Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision (1950) and an alien masquerade, part 2 of 2.

Rev., Feb 15-16, 23-24, 2022.

Velikovsky continues, “the swift shifting of the atmosphere under the impact of the gaseous parts of the comet, the drift of air attracted by the body of the comet, and the rush of the atmosphere resulting from  inertia when the earth stopped rotation or shifted its poles, all contributed to produce hurricanes…of a worldwide dimension” 87 The dark figure who brought this was called Hurakan, from which “hurricane” derives, a darkness swept by wind, Hurakan killed “a major part of the human race”: 87 A hurricane was called a diluvium venti by the Romans, a deluge of wind. 88 The red sea is also called the shari, or the sea of percussion, mare percussionis, because of the strike and disaster 89

Then, in fact, this happened because “the slowing down or stasis of the earth in its rotation would cause a tidal recession of waters, toward the poles, but the celestial body near by would disturb the poleward recession, drawing the water toward itself” 91, thus causing high waves to crash over all. Even the Choctaw have a legend of mountain-high waves rapidly coming nearer, and they are in Oklahoma 91. Thus the “seas heaped up in immense tides” caused a “pageant” to go on in the sky, “which presented itself to the horrified onlookers on earth as a gigantic battle” 96

The Battle of the Waves, Velikovsky 1940 2 23 22

Again, as to the bright day, this happened because the pass of the comet distorted the orbit of the earth, thus, “emerging from the darkness, the Eastern hemisphere faced the head of the comet. This head only shortly before had passed close to the sun and was in a state of incandescence, thus the night was as bright as the day of the summer solstice”. 97 Also, “the tail of the comet and its head, having become entangled with each other by their close contact with the earth, exchanged violent discharges of electricity” “it looked like a battle between the brilliant globe and the dark column of smoke”. “In the exchange of the electrical potentials, the tail and the head were attracted one to the other and repelled from one to the other, from the serpentlike tail extensions flew” 97 “It looked now like a furious animal with legs and many heads”. 97 Thus, “the events in the sky were viewed by the peoples of the world as a fight between an evil monster in the form of a serpent and the light-god who engaged the monster in battle and thus saved the world”. 98 This in the description of typhon as having hands that extend from horizon to horizon, a hundred dragons head, a body all winged, fiery eyes, hurling rocks, and hissing and shouting, 99 Needless to say, all this interests me, as Velikovsky is having sky visions which I have traced from Nuremberg on.

fire serpent velikovsky 1940 2 23 22

Indeed, at one point, he mentions Rockenbach, who wrote De cometic tractatus novus methodicus in 1602, he found a copy in the US, he synchronized the battle of Typhon with the Hebrew Exodus.The same argument was made by Samuel Bochart in Hierozoicon, another 17^th cent book (on internet archive but in unreadable German original copy). For him the flight of Typhon is the exodus of Moses from Egypt.105 Another element is that the sky collapsed, and this was caused by a rain of meteorites and fire from the sky, this too a universal legend 109. Then when the two celestial bodies were driven near each other, :the interior of the globe pushed toward the exterior, disturbing the rotation, causing heat, and this melted the land and boiled the oceans” 111. The Talmud then describes a curious incident, regarding the Mountain of the Lawgiving, which appeared to lift up and shake over the heads of the people. As a result, the people “felt as if they were no longer standing securely on the ground, but were held up by some invisible force (this sounds like my dizziness)”, “the presence of a heavenly body over head caused this phenomenon and this feeling (this a hover dream)”. 115

Then too the earthquakes resulted in roaring noise from the earth, earthquakes were preceded by a terrible sound

Sinai Floats over the People Velikovsky 1940 2 23 22

“the earth heaved deep sighs, “the sun was attributed to the gods and called theophany (this sentient, and ambient, horror based) 116. At Sinai the trumpet sounded long, the sound was read by Moses as “I am that I am”, and says exodus, “all the people saw the roars, and the torches, and the noise of the trumpet, they trembled, and stood far off” 117 (tremble). Says Velikovsky, the approach of two charged globes toward each other could also produce trumpetlike sounds 117. The thunderings and lightnings, as described in Exodus, the names are KOLO and LAPIDUM (two more demons) 117. Velikovsky also seems to claim that the ten commandments were sonic pareidols heard sounding in the sky, so “Lo Tirzah” thou shalt not kill, and Lo tinaf thou shalt not commit adultery, this was heard’ by all the inhabitants of the earth 118. Even more extreme, Velikovsky claims that this disturbance caused the earth to flip from east to west and up and down, (the flip dream construct), soon “the side which is now turned toward the evening once faced the morning” 125/ Ipuwer says the land turned round as does a potters wheel, the earth turned upside down, This caused terrible devastation 127.

Kolo and Lapidum velikovsky 1940 2 23 22

the trumpets of kolo and lapidum reversed the earth’s east to west. Velikovsky 1940 2 23 22

“Harakhte” embodied this, it means “he riseth in the west, 128. This is proven by the magnetization of some rocks, polarized oppositely from the prevailing present direction 135. Pliny describes the gloomy year after Caesars death, a whole year of continuous gloom, Virgil says, the sun veiled his shining face in dusky gloom, and a godless age feared everlasting night. Germany heard the clash of arms through all the sky (again, the battle in the sky), the Alps rocked with unwonted terror, and specters, pale and wondrous-wise, were seen at evening twilight 146. The gloom in the year after Caesar was once again caused by the dust of the comet dispersed in the atmosphere., The “clash of arms” heard through all the sky was probably the sound that accompanied the entrances of the gases and dust into the earth’s atmosphere 147. This same process drew blood to the skin and made Ethiopians black 164.

Then Velikovsky focuses on Venus and Mars,  the feast of their convergence involved a day of atonement, in which a goat was sent as scapegoat into the desert, to Azazel, the fallen star of lucifer, typhon Seth, Uzza thrown into the Red Sea allowed the passage, 176. This is related because the morning star is the star that first appeared after the convulsions and this was Venus, It looked like a serpent, called Gukumatz or Kukulcan, the Mexican name representing the catastrophe 177. It seems Venus changed its nature then too, taken as a prodigy 178. The golden calf was the image of the star, the bull, the star that attacks the planets. 186 When Athene Tritogeneia, or third born, was born, the sky wailed 185. This happened on March 19, in Exodus this was the 13^th day after the vernal equinox, the night of the great shock 192. An offshoot of this was when manna fell into the rivers, turning them to milk, thus the bull worship became cow worship 201. As for Venus’s path, “Venus sprang out of Jupiter as a comet and flew very close to the earth, it became entangled in the embrace of the earth, the heat cased the vermin of the earth to propagate at a feverish state, the plagues of gods and locusts must be ascribed to such causes”, 204. The multitude of flies was under the aegis of Beelzebub, Ball Zevov, Ares the fly god too, 205

Gukumatz and the rain of larvae in Mexico velikovksy 1940 2 12 22

In Mexico, Sahagun reports people thought comet tails shot darts that caused larvae to form on things, corrupting them, for that they closed their chimneys and apertures against the morning star to prevent the mishap from penetrating into the house together with the light. 206. The Egyptians, however, thought that the flies in the tail of Venus were “not merely the earthly brood, swarming in heat like other vermin, BUT GUESTS FROM ANOTHER PLANET”. In this context, Velikovsky writes MODERN BIOLOGISTS TOY WITH THE IDEA THAT MICROORGANISMS ARRIVE ON THE EARTH FROM INTERSTELLAR SPACES, CARRIED BY THE PRESSURE OF LIGHT. Hence, the idea of the arrival of living ORGANISMS FROM INTERPLANETARY SPACES IS NOT NEW. WHETHER THERE IS TRUTH TO THIS SUPPOSITION OF LARVAL CONTAMIATION OF THE EARTH IS ANYONE’S GUESS. THE ABILITY OF MANY SMALL INSECTS AND THEIR LARVAE TO ENDURE GREAT COLD AND HEAT AND TO LIVE IN AN ATMOSPHEREE OF OXYGENE RENDERS NOT ENTIRELY IMPROBABLY THE HYPOTHESIS (and also Jupiter, from which Venus sprang, may be populated by vermin 207.) THIS…is the smoking gun, likely the source for the idea underlying the formulation of the story in Invasion (1978)

Jupiter and the Body Snatchers from space thesis velikovsky 1940 2 23 22

All of these notes, made on the 23^rd, then bounced off works of art by Robert Nava, which I saw later in the day and posted on.

Robert Nava, of the moment…or minute, Night Gallery, his latest effort really hit the synchroetherhhoe* spot with me because I am still reading Immanuel Velikovsky’s catastrophist visions of ancient history, used as source for the Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), it was odd to me that he said he figured it all out after he escaped from Europe to New York in 1940, I figured (imaginatively) that he was having Gerard Nerval type panic attacks, underscoring his crazy idea that the people of Israel during Exodus witnessed a comet clashing with the earth’s atmosphere causing a hurricane in the sky to look like a great battle between a lightning god and a gigantic many-headed red dragon, and then when the comet’s head hit the already debris-strewn black cloud of the sky over Sinai the mountain of the law lifted up by volcanic eruption created an earthcrackup noise heard as celestial trumpets so loud they reversed the earth on its axis, east to west, caused the Israelites to feel tossed up into the air and the earth to boil and melt below them (precisely a stage three dizzy attack), the trumpets of doom, the mountain become sound, called in the bible Kolo and Lapidum. I made a graph of this nightmare structure, and scirpographs, over scenes of New York, Fire Serpent, and Kolo and Lapidum, Velikovsky 1940. Which look pretty close, though graphs, to Nava, so, he has catastrophist imagination, which is a thing, and his push-pull is actually quite psychodynamically true. *my word, everything all at once flowing together, it can also be catastrophic.

Velikovsky goes on, The Skidi Pawnee of Nebraska, in particular, believe that the world is endangered by the Venus 211. This is the story of the sacrifice of al virgin to the morning star in March, her body painted to look like the star, red, in a black skirt, hair and face painted red, he describes the whole thing, with a source, 212. “At the appearance of the morning star the girl’s heart was ripped out, the sacrifice smeared himself with blood, everyone shot arrows at her, then fire from bundle laid to the directions lit” 213. In Velikovsky’s history Venus was a comet that became a planet. Even Isaiah railed against it, “o lucifer, son of the morning” 222. According to Velikovsky, Venus was born as a comet in 2000 bc, in 1000 bc it twice made contact with earth, which changed its orbit. In the 800s bc there was still another comet, that caused further changes 223. Then came a commotion, celebrated on February 26 747 229, Isiah foresaw the destruction, if not for a small portion left, we would’ve been like Sodom and Gommorah 230. Everyone retreated into caves, 231 “What aileth thee now, that thou art wholly gone up to the housetops?: 232  This was the shaog, or earth shock, the field of action which is the entire world versus a localized earthquake, a shaking of the earth brings a shaking of the sky with it, 233. “Fear, and the pit, and the snare are upon thee, O inhabitants of the earth”, 233. It is here that Velikovsky defends his reading by arguing that it has been lost because rationalists make metaphors out of everything, 239, which is a critique I practice, 239. Then too Nebuchadnezzar, “I will shake the heavens and the earth shall remove out of her place, in the wrath of the lord of hosts, and in the day of his fierce anger” 240. Velikovsky comments “In a settled world nothing altered the given order. To sustain this doctrine, the prophecies were translated into metaphors, Maimonides said the prophets would never predict the upsetting of nature” 241.

Further on, Velikovsky carries his determinism even further. Describing a rite of the Aztecs, where a priest shot an arrow into the effigy of Huitzilopochtli, which penetrated the god, who was then considered dead,” Velikovsky argues that “this appears to have been a symbolic repetition of the electrical discharge that Venus ejected towards Mars”. 272 In India, there was many terms for planetary junctions, conjunctions, unitings, unions and encounters, and when they battled, the force of the planet or its battle won or lost. 274 He also argues that Huitzi was a shape shifter in imitation of the act that the atmosphere of the planet Mars was distorted by its approaches to other celestial bodies and “took on different shapes:” 282 In Rome, the reason Romulus ended up in legend being cared for by wolves is that the planet Mars was occasionally shrouded in a wolflike way, this is also suggested by the fact that in story Romulus was born in the middle of a total eclipse 282. It was also due to the trembling earth, the displacement of the poles, the change of the climate, the frightening prodigies in the sky, that the Aztecs were told by huitzi to move, so they carried their idol with them searching for a new home, and thereafter  “asserted that this idol commanded them to land in their country” 287. Pliny also wrote about the planetary discharge, “heavenly fire spit forth by the planet as crackling charcoal flies from a burning lo.” 290. Mars-Nergal was, moreover, the one with the power to move the earth off its hingers, the earth, says Isiah, removed out of its place, 292. (This reminds me again that in extremis of schizo Nerval had a vision of the earth knocked out of its orbit, right outside the Louvre). Velikovsky also writes recurrent displacement of the terrestrial globe, torsion of the lithosphere, and migration of the inner parts of the globe must have caused a succession of earthquakes, 292. Again, in terms of mythology, “when Mars was very close to the earth, its two Trabants, a word for satellite, were visible. They rushed in front of and around Mars, in the disturbance that took place, they probably snatched some of Mars’ atmosphere…and appeared as gleaming manes.” This emerged in mythology as Mars’ steeds when he was descending to earth to punish people. Velikovsky even is amused that Asaph Hall, in naming the satellites of Mars, without realizing the connection to the myth and to the fact of the displacement, named them Phobos (terror) and Deimos (rout) 298, Venus also was said to have hair because, transitioning from a comet, it still had a tail. Thus, when it clashed with Mars, asteroids and meteorites were torn from this trailing part, and began a semi-independent existence. These swarms of meteorites with their gaseous appendages were newborn comets, which closely followed Mars like a troop following its leader 299. These became in myth the terrible ones, the furies. Velikovsky again describes the hallucination, “The comets looked like revolving torches or writhing snakes, they assumed the form of spinning wheels and the celestial phantasmagoria appeared like swift chariots, changing their forms, the Maruts looks like horses racing along the sky and then again like a host of warriors, leaping, climbing, irresistible” 301. The spectators saw the celestial prodigies either as demons, as the Erinyes of the Greeks or the Furies of the Latins, or executors of the lord’s wrath, as in Joel and Isaiah, 304. The stone of Cronus at Delphi, the image of Diana at Ephesus, the stones of Amon and Seth at Thebes, the palladium of Troy, all were meteorites that fell from the sky. 307. The stone on which the temple of Solomon was built, Eben shetiya, the fire stone, was a bolide that fell in the beginning of the tenth century, in the time of David, when a comet, which bore the appearance of a man with a sword was seen in the sky. The sacred shield of Numa at Rome, the ancile of Roman Mars, was also a bolide, it fell from the sk, 208. Comets seen on the screen of the sky also were seen to look like witches on brooms all over the world. 323. Velikovsky also argues that the myths of Venus and Mars come from people seeing the play of Mars and Venus in the sky. He compares it to sex, “interplanetary contacts in the celestial sphere are in some respects similar to congress and germination in the biological worlds. In these contacts the bodies of the planets overflow with lava, fertile ground for vegetation, and comets born of such contacts fly across the solar system and rain as stones and possibly also spores, germs or larvae on planets. (here again, the invasion scenario)” 379.

One finds in Velikovsky, then, the continuation to 1940 in New York of a visionary culture stretching back to German Renaissance prints where celestial events were likewise interpreted as religious miracle events. Velikovsky places ancient texts in the position of prototype, and forces the solar system to conform to it. This results in a highly impossible conception of space, and it is surprising that anyone felt it necessary to refute. It is especially interesting to find both blood rain, a battle in the sky, and the casting or tilting of the earth out of orbit, tropes of visions going back to Nuremberg 1561, but forward to Nerval, in my studies of it, all have origins in the bible, and then Velikovsky literalizes them for the 20^th century. My theory is that all are psychodynamic, and can be graphed out.

Thus, in placing Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision (1950) in the movie, both visually, and mentioned, the movie momentarily retrogresses to a prototype state in which the spores coming to earth seemed possible. All horror movies have this “if this is true, then anything can be true” moment, it is the forward part of the to be continued trope, it unsettles one into the foo space, and lets then the movie proceed with its horror. But, again, as I noted, I felt this in the sequence, the Velikovsky seemed to pull apart the coherent sense of place and time and render the mis en scene as porous and psallictive, allowing of any unbelievable thing. The lore also ensconces the descent of the invasion in the context of comet or meteoric sky sights, and thus Elizabeth’s freak out in downtown that suddenly everything seems different, this is yet another iteration of a kind of vision I have traced back by way of Nerval to Glasner in 1561 Nuremburg. The sudden change of consciousness of so much of the public is another catastrophist horror on par with those mentioned above. The fact that the new tower built in San Francisco at the time, the Transameria pyramid, then only one year old, was in this case read as a kind of UFO bringing the spores to earth, the representative, then, of an encounter of the third kind, whereas the movie itself is indirectly about an encounter of the fifth kind, but transferred to the home court of the victims.

But, again, once again, a 70s movie is pulled apart and some of it given to the honeycomb in a bottled up, unspoken unconscious space prototypical to it, and thus this subrosaplot wiggles through things. The fact that Nimoy is a book author reinforces as well the idea that in the 70s foo culture, tabloid culture, penumbra cultures, all this was conveyed, as I have taken note, by means of mass market paperbacks with deadpan captions and limited but authoritative pictures.

Then, things get strange. As Nancy is taking care of the older fat man, the one reading Velikovsky gets dressed and is leaving but we see him move as if a shadow behind the veil of the green curtains between tables or bathings, and in this capacity he more or less represents Acoupane, a forecaster of trouble coming from deeper in the universe.

I looked at this title, no vibe yet

As this is a dream figure, his presence in this role bespeaks that this strange site is sunk in hypnagogy, represented by the mud.

Then, for some reason, he takes up a position in one of the cubicles, and when Nancy opens the curtain to find him, he asks her, almost as if a test or a prophecy, have you read Starmaker by Olaf Stapledon? and, then, have you reading Worlds in Collision by Velikovksy?

And perhaps Nancy knows his game and suspects he is once again trying to mystify her, so she shoots back, I’ve read Velikovsky many times, meaning that she is a total counterculture hippie but now set loose in her own world in the 70s.; Nancy is partially hidden when asked, she is kind of stunned he is there, but answers.

Right after this happened, seeing Jeff Goldblum somehow patronizing the place, I had an odd thought.

Another person whose personal belief system is not aligned with reality, but filled with weird ideas from pseudoscience, but, apparently still, at the time, still believed in as truth. The bottom dropped out, and the whole scene, and it is possible I felt something that taught me of the origins of the oft-mentioned pulled-apart nature of movies in the 70s, they were pulled apart because the sense of reality had splintered into various cults, and, in the 70s, nothing was adding up.

At this point, the movie goes over the top in making use of this mis en trope as a talus in the manner of a reverie field of bedsheets, as we now movie cautiously through the green veils (and they would be evocative of entoptic sightings), there is a hissing.

Then Nancy comes in on another client, and says, “Oh Jack, you’re going to suffocate”, because he is covered up completely, over the head

Perhaps, it could be argued, this is a bit quick to spill all the beans, and tell us the whole mechanism by which the aliens are snatching bodies up. Now Goldblum and Sutherland come in and they do all the study of it, appalled

But as a construct, it fits entirely in the mis en trope of a public bath that gives green mud baths and bodies are covered and uncovered in strange ways. It is all but a figure of the place, green, check, vague, check, covered in gunk, check, and, then, even, unformed, chck, being then a figure of the way in which Nancy and all engage with reality, and then even childlike, so that too. It is all but emblematic of the 70s, where just as shadows were taller than our souls, bodies were pulled out of themselves, to, in emergency, undertake strange adventures, unreal, and in the leap from 60s activism to 70s idealism a number did not make the jump and crashed and burned, thus a time of carnage due to the influence of cult ideas too.

Then the fact that we see a shot of Jeff Goldblum lying down, to prepare for a massage, or maybe a bit more of after hours with his wife, so a whisper of kinkiness in a crawlspace is suggested for the place too; and, then, unbeknownst to him, it is lying a few stalls down, this suggests, one on one, a peculiar masquerade, which I have not overly outlined as yet. I have noticed that lattice level dreams are simply narrow projections of what is going on in the body of the sleeper, translated into the imagery of a dream. This like all dream elements can take a very close to the body and far from the body look. A body that is quite heavy with no lift can likely dream its own pain, where some demon is literally a figure of a pain in the side. This arrangement suggests a deeper level of the Empty Pillow syndrome, akin to the Death Mask, but full body. Again, a Death Mask is when you wake up (but not) and see your face gazing at you from the other pillow, a mirror effect. Now it is posited that there is a redoubt just below that where one’s sleeping body can dream one’s body next to it and in some way alter or tailor that body to wake up as someone else. And if this process is coopted by a superior force then that function can be used to make your sleep create yourself in facsimilia but this time one taken over by them, and one of them, foreign to you. This is not a hover dream, but a side by side dream, working on the trope of a transplant or transformation surgery, like in Frankenstein. It suggests that if a tingle captures the whole of you in sleep it can then as if by a mirror create a dream body that is improved upon one, and thus you wake up with it. But again, here, the process is reversed, and by the use of a pod with a magic power given it by the spores, this model unformed sucks form from one to create a facsimile of one, that then to take over, that is, it to wake up, your old self to collapse into an empty skin (an idea I saw echoed in Antlers this week where the Wendigo possesses the subject to such an extent that his face is left hanging disembodied out front as a veil disembodied. Also, in Paranormal activity: Next of Kin, Margot searches for secrets in an attic room, then has to hide in a bed; when a weight settles in on it, to press her down, she has to look, and sees, I think, only a black wig, this, with the tin and the doll would be, see my treatment in The Man Who Haunted Himself) a pegma. This body magic might relate to bed spells that seek to return lost loved ones to one’s bed (see the 1930s former slave tapes).

Indeed, in its negative, horror sense, I just encountered a version of this. In Privilege (2022, Germany) it turns out that Finn is an orphan twin, taken in by his parents precisely because of no relation, with no family connection, and it seems that him being the child of low class people was taken as a good thing, again breaking ties, for then older members of the cult to dance in his skin when they age out. I compare this to the Alraune mythos, wherein a girl is born of a magic plant with formal humanoid properties, but vegetable, and since the child of a murderer or worse, she grows up empty and evil. This scenario of podding is also of a vegetable character, thus bespeaking a possession. For now, I will call this area the Alraune trope masquerade.

But, then, while Goldblum was able to wake up, and thus pull back from it, Matthew realizes immediately that Elizabeth must be in trouble, because she fell asleep, so he calls her, we already see a lesion of cave-in in her face. While Goldblum and Nancy thus run away from the pod that is trying to take over him, he runs back to Elizabeth’s house to then come up through the back window of the basement in a corkscrew around pod Geoffrey’s inattention to rescue her.

By the time he gets up to her he sees her copy growing in the greenhouse nearby and she is fairly well developed, except that her boobs remain a bit flat and have no nipples yet, but just in time. The whole body looks gelatinous and greasy, gross, not a trace of sexuality.

Then, when later challenged, I forget the sequencing, we are given an alibi formation, we see a mound of dirt, two upturned basic pots are meant to be what he thought were her breasts, and then another kind of pre-Columbian pot up top is meant to be a face, and the overall purpose of this masquerade alibi form is so that nonbelievers can say, see, this is what you saw, I can see where you might think for a moment, in panic, that that was a body.

(as in so many of the sequences in the movie, haunted by its classic prototype, the 1956 version, this telling is all but a remake of the episode by which he goes to the house, then finds a lookalike pod in a freezer or store cabinet in the basement. Then, when talked out of it, he is shown the alibi formation. Again, in this case, an alibi formation is like an Alraune in form but different in that it is an assemblage of objects meant to look like the original. These forms of masquerade I will borrow from the above, and call Trabants.

All of this gets a bit too busy for me, with the police called, etc, here is an odd energy in the tiny room they argue in, Nimoy is aloof, suggesting that he has been taken over,

Geoffrey we know is taken over and a blank face, he seems profiled by an odd blank face picture, bespeaking the obtuseness of his presence,

(this is a classic Trabant formation aka alibi formation but in reverse, it exposes Geoffrey as not him by disembodying him with the double of a mirror, therefore, a blank space, within (and in the original at one point the pod form was called a blank), and then the through-the-window peeping, which shows that no one is home. This is a Trabant picture)

Then it is in this context that Nancy gets to let loose with her hippie talk, and she believes that what has happened is a kind of poisoning which is reenacting the creation of the human race out of apes by aliens eons ago, this is a new phase. She seems to believe that the human race was created by aliens mating with apes (so on par with Kubrick).

Then, after this, another walkabout, by Sutherland, and then he gets a direct attack, and we see fully the pod process, and, after a long run around, neither of them get out, the end. (at some future date I will fill in with part 3, on the Velikovskyian elements of the movie, which go completely over the top with a catastrophist vision of the USA in 1976).

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision (1950) and an alien masquerade, part 1 of 2.

Rev., Feb 15-16, 23-24, 2022.

An odd encounter in my viewing, yesterday. A movie I have not in the past much liked, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), hit the spot, then, worse, turned out to be exactly about what I am thinking about, and, then, finally, suffered a rrhexis, whereat it came off the screen into my life to underwrite my basic feelings about my fellow man in the coming postcovid era, in which I believe I will never be the same in terms of hoping for the best. I posted about the rrhexis, my term for when a movie as movie ruptures out of itself, and becomes “real” in the space and world around you. This is, in fact, a failure of horror, and an example of an effect I have long since called a brimming over the top, an example of reverse agency.

“My latest thing, if I see creepy old guy reading a weird old 70s paperback in the mud bath in, for example, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), I get the book and read it; after he gets out he mysteriously asks Nancy, “Have you read Velikovsky’s “Worlds in Collision’ “? She’s like, “I’ve read Velikovsky seven times!” The exchange pulls the scene to pieces, you think, their world is a patchwork of conspiracy theories, all of them vulnerable, then, to snatching. This sets up a “rrhexis” (or rupture) in the viewing, when Elizabeth freaks out on the street, suddenly aware that in one day, everyone was different, “I’m really scared!” she cries, the movie reached out of itself and I, watching it in 2022AD, I got really scared, for real. (Velikovsky’s claim in Worlds in Collision (1950) that a comet near miss caused all the catastrophe stories you hear in world mythology was so popular that Carl Sagan finally had to take it on in the 70s, attacking it as pseudoscience, still, it’s a great read, blood rain.”

In fact, the whole scene in the public baths always struck me as odd, but I had a better notion of it this time. Let met work that out.

The movie starts, in the title sequence, on a planet not earth, maybe Mars, and we see the growth of some sort of spore that then wafts off into space and comes in down upon earth. We see the sun

then we are on a kind of miasmic Mars, smoking with a sense of life

this then reveals that here and there are gelatinous forms, developing therefrom

then we see it, the whole horror. This is, in my terminology, a vision of hell on earth, Chloros stage two level, a miasmic muck of generative godawfulness

they take on form, and move with form

we see as if germination, inside something

then a view of Jupiter, I think

and now we see the spores rising up into space,

emblematic, Velikovskyian shot, the garden of Eden

off they go

then we sort of backspin on the 2001 Space odyssey wormhole sequence when it arrives at the plateauing level, the surface of a planet, Mars, who knows

and these spores in space make noises, whirrings,

almost like spermatozoa

then very far off, the third rock

we zero in

and in

transition to our world

and, importantly, a tilt, to create a particular kind of fata morgana, a flip, like the one I saw in 2018

then a curious shot, as if rrhexising it all into ambience

I cant exactly say what this is, looks like a cross, apotropaic

and there, as if the stake, being rung by horseshoes from space

then zooming superfast, crashing in

San Francisco

but foregrounded, as never would be, by plants, which seem to be wet with some sort of strange dew, ick

and  touchdown, plant impregnated by the spore from space

more of it, nature covered in it, ew

and the rain brings in more

then we go micro

love the violin screech here, er-eek

and, the logic of the scene tells us, the first pod, which, as soon as a human gets some of it on it, will then germinate, to take him or her over, by way of an Alraune double

it is a beautiful sequence, likely not even carefully watched by most viewers, which lays out the entire Velikovskyian theory. Again, the Velikovsky solar system is not steady state, or imposing, in the sense of presenting human beings with many seemingly insurmountable obstacles to exploration, it is alive in its geological time now, it is as if a million years ago, still going on today; and, indeed, in which solar system as recently as a thousand BC Venus as a comet broke out of Jupiter, then warred with Mars, both events causing tremendous disasters on earth, then it swung around earth in an almost head to head equal scaled encounter, which sounds like earth cast into a death mask situation, in which Venus is the death mask, almost a twinning, with twinfire, and indeed a double, that then the prototype formation astrologically, the goal being to twin oneself with the cosmos, which I see as grotesque egotism, this then also included a solar system which was fertile in itself casting seeds all about on a space age level, that then being the real way by this paradigm that aliens come to earth. That is, just as we make use of unmanned spacecraft to venture out farther than actual human beings could go, aliens send out biological entities to carry themselves to far off places, then once they germinate, voila, an alien has landed.

The suggestion is that aliens have come to earth, but by means of a paradigm entirely different than the dominant one in postwar discourse on the topic of UFOs. That is, if I may make use of a formalist model I developed in the 70s, based on a five point star, there is the material paradigm, the aural paradigm, the formal paradigm, the color paradigm and the time paradigm. By far, in the postwar era, the material paradigm dominated, with the concentration being on the formal gore, the form being the UFO saucer or cigar shapes come to earth. The “material” is worked out mirroring the technical capabilities of earthlings, to then imagine technology in advance of us. But the material paradigm can also subdivide into the idea that aliens could come here by other means, material but different, and the idea that they come by spores and plants and grow us that way is one of those. This counterparadigm is supported by a modernist notion of twinfire of the self, that is, that there are at least two sides to everything, which would open up one of the sides to take over by another. The basic idea is appearance versus reality. In the 70s, the pendulum had swung clearly to the reality versus the appearance, but, now, of course, that has swung back. By this idea a self would have a gap space doubling in his or her shadow, and it is imagined that this space is the space able to be colonized by aliens. As the movie progresses we are going to see the emergence of this shadow space as plant space more dramatically. The complicating part is the involvement of sleep.

Next morning, not quite aware that Geoffrey has turned, Elizabeth wakes up early (she has been coaxed to it by Sutherland, her colleague). She gazes briefly, then she looks over to see an Empty Pillow, this is the Empty Pillow syndrome, the story nicely tucked into it, wherein worst case imaginings are generated, in panic, then she turns over to her side

And, surprise, even shock, she sees Geoffrey just sitting there on her side of the bed, all dressed and groomed, and she is shocked. This is a masquerade, the Empty Pillow, worst case scenario imagining. What would normally happen now is that she would get up, thinking herself awake, and go looking for that scenario, and she would find it.

What happens here is that, presuming that he was just watching her for some reason, he then walks off, we only see his profile and back

And then he keeps walking, down the stairs

And then out down a back porch, and here too we hardly see him at all

And then she goes up front to see him give the garbage directly to the garbage men and it has to be a bit suspicious of who knows what that he stands there until the grey debris he handed in is crunched in.

Then to see him,

perhaps a man who had to be coaxed to take the garbage out, standing in the middle of the street, with the garbage pail, watching the truck move off, as if it was an important thing in his life

This creeps her out.

It is, in fact, a version of the Empty Pillow nightmare fantasy, but in a waking state.

Then a clock on the mantel, symbol of the house, and which he walked right by, perhaps making her suspicious by him not undertaking some little ritual of attention that he did every day, this tilts her head, to make her think, and now here the clock chime wakes her up, as it were (but not in fact in this telling).

It is important in the mis en scene that the house and the garden are vertically below the bed, that is, under the bed. The night before she was off camera most of the time expressing her curious suspicion about the odd plant she found in the park, and he was off camera watching the game. Their apparent lack of face time is perhaps the plausibility enhancing device to make it halfway plausible that Elizabeth would then the next morning wake up and have a firm and fixed conviction that this thing that looked like Geoffrey was not Geoffrey. Her problem here is that she has woken up into a nightmare, and may spend the rest of the movie in it. As a result, the garden and the area ways from it to the street or to the back (and in the use of this space Kaufman picks up a thread from Antonioni in Blow Up) are a classic talus, a elaborate dream space meant to stage a reverie as it sinks in as a game of hide n seek to compromise visuality and make one uncertain what is what. As Elizabeth has her Empty Pillow panic attack waking up, she is in a vigilogogic state, but post-sleepy, this space is very quickly sinking down into hypnagogy.

The last movie that I have seen before which somehow in the moment instantiated to become insightful of my own emotional state was when I came back flummoxed on many levels from the doctor in January and then watched Halloween 5, in which the little girl is clairvoyant, and that whole movie is an extension of the original logic of the field of bedsheets on the line that Michael Myers first scared Laurie Strode with, expanded to Ellie’s house, and her taking a shower, and then the house where the girl is living is remade entirely as a “thrin” of such spaces top to bottom, with the basement and then too the laundry chute to it a central part of conveying how it is by clairvoyance that she follows him.

The same sort of thing goes on here. The vision of downtown San Francisco that Kaufman projects is that each of them, Elizabeth and Matthew, working close to the capitol, live their working lives in little mazes of routine, going in and out of places, and without transition are back in the hallways of their official building again. When he passes by a window, Kaufman shows him rush by from the POV of the Raven’s Gate, which only sees the dead, seeing him we know he is to die. But in perhaps a less extreme form the goal here to show each urban space in a somewhat complicated way as another reverie or whack a mole formation. This involves discourse too, and the idea that the spaces are not coherent but mazes of differing POVs not coming to terms with each other. It is kind of a 70s hangover view of the cultural revolution of the 60s, which has left a lot of people floating in a space where it is unclear what is real or not, almost foo.

Skipping over the book signing party, and the whole interaction on the street with Nimoy as if doing his shrinking in the dark on the street, we come then nonsensically by way of the fact that since his wife works there Jeff Goldblum has taken up bathing at the public bath she works at, and so we go into there.

The bathhouse scene has always struck me as strained, as a mis en trope. Again, a mis en trope is a space or structure that is fashioned self-consciously to rhyme with elements of an earlier scene in the movie, or the overall theme of the movie, or the original movie if this is a sequel, in which the whole thing is a constructed version of the same thing. Since in the title sequence we were shown a nice illustration of the pod spore theory of how aliens came to earth, and that featured yucky viscous nature, creepy greenish spores, a complicated landscape, in fact, alien, and then they came to earth, then it follows that in every scene in the movie the talus is going to have to be constructed of the yucky, viscous, green, complicated, and alien, and, indeed, this is what the bath turns out to be. Not only is it a yucky mess, with some men taking what looks like green mud baths, a heavyset one getting out, showing butt crack as he grabs his towel

Then to be hosed off and massaged by Nancy as if a dead horse. It is odd that Nancy is working in this place, but as we find out that she is a post-hippie and believes it seems in miracle diets and cures it is construable that she has devised the miracle green mud bath and all of this is of her making. As she is a person that works with odd unshapely bodies in close quarters with a lot of green muck mud and hosing and the like, the space presents itself as an elaborate alibi formation, as well as, at the same time, a plausibility enhancing device, we have already been dislodged from normalcy by the fact that it does turn out that Nimoy as a psychiatrist is a bit of a believer in the charlatan as he claims that there is a sort of “hallucinatory flu” going around, and we are in the middle of a strange pandemic (so to make the movie like the Crazies), and so this bizarre set becomes as if the Jack in the Box space in which the mystery is explored and sprung.

And this is where my inosculation comes in. Again, an inosculation is when, watching a movie, I see a work or art or especially an old book of the 70s made use of to write in the underthebottom of the film, and this started with Saint Maud and the Blake book given her by Amanda last Spring, I read that book, and then explore the degree to which the book exists in the honeycomb in the prototypal ur-space of the movie, and ideas in it fed ideas expressed in the movie, making it all more 3D. When Nancy helps the big man out of the green mud, and we are given a bit of butt crack, behind it we see an older man sitting up to the neck in his mud bath reading a little 70s paperback, of the kind I really like and which has become as it were on the core sources of foo in the decade, what I call creepy 70s paperbacks with creepy old pictures with creepy old captions, entirely presented as fact, but entirely inadequate, and it is as noted Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision (1950).

The fact that he would read it so intently sunk deep in the green mud serves as a nice visual metaphor for what is being conveyed, that somehow this book is responsible for the theory of the movie we are in.

Velikovsky posits a catastrophist view of the world, he finds evidence of catastrophes past in the earth and planets, evidence still extant, 10, “signs of recent violence, disruption, and fragmentation have been observed on earth, and elsewhere in the solar system, a submarine gigantic canyon that runs almost twice around the globe, a sign of a global twist; a layer of ash of extraterrestial origin underlying all oceans; ‘gases escaping from craters in the moon”. He says that his view of things came to him in New York after he resettled there exiled from Europe. It started with him seeing that in Exodus passages evince a ‘great physical catastrophe, thus linking cosmic events with a worldly event, and placing that in time. 18 He did this by reading Exodus as history, and then conforming its descriptions of celestial events to actual catastrophes in the past. He believes that this places the exodus at the end of the middle kingdom, and overlays these catastrophes on the plagues of Egypt story. Thus, for example, while stoics believed that the earth would end in the great winter or summer of the year, either a cataklysmos, or flooding, or ekpyrosis, or burning, he takes their beliefs to be literally true, based on actual events witnessed in time. From this, he elaborates, sometimes thrillingly so. Having a long time interest in where the belief in blood rain came from, he argues that a comet passing close to the earth passed its perihelion and thus “touched the earth first with its gaseous tail” 68 A rusty pigment then was precipitated on earth and in rivers and lakes, all then with a “bloody coloring” 68 Ipuwer is called an “Egyptian eyewitness to the catastrophe,” writing that the river is blood, blood is everywhere, 69 The hematoid pigment in the water also killed all the fish, which resulted in another plague, the smell, exodus says, and the river stank, 7:21 In Thrace, their tallest mountain was called Haemus because streams of blood flowed from it, said to be where Zeus struck Typhon with a thunderbolt (which Velikovsky says was the comet). 69 In mythology the world was red with the blood of Tiamat, Osiris and Seth respectively 70 This is also why, says Palmer 1892 the Red Sea was called Erythrean, and the mountainous desert the Israelites wandered in Edom, red. 70 Instances of blood rain, Velikovsky writes, have been recorded in divers countries. This red dust, says Velikovsky, falling from the sky, “does not originate in clouds, but must come from volcanic eruptions or from cosmic spaces”. 71 This rain also included naphtha, or petroleum, which poured down on the earth.

The really remarkable thing about Velikovsky’s narrative is that he follows the passage of the comet from phase to phase, and then finds passages in scripture to validate. Thus, after setting up the basic problem above, he then goes on to explain the darkness plague, and this derived from the fact that the earth entered deeper into the tail of the onrushing comet…which resulted in a disturbance in the rotation of the earth… this change or reversal of the angular velocity of rotation caused hurricanes to sweep over the earth, all because of the “sweeping gases, dust and cinders of the comet” 78

couple of weeks later, it occurred to me, a Ukrainian version

An added dimension here is that Velikovsky makes a special point of saying that all of his ideas came to him in 1940 in New York City after he had escaped to Palestine from Europe, then to New York on account of World War 2: and for that I can’t help but think that in the long tradition of celestial visions over cities going back to Nuremberg 1561 (in my tracing this past year), up through Nerval, and on to the opening title sequence in the movie, that he had these sorts of visions in the skies over, I seem to think, the west side of New York. Thus, I retrace the scirpograph in a for instance sky over New York midcentury 20^th century.

This took place in the nine days mentioned in the bible, when “there was no exit from the palace, and no one could see others in front of them, visibility was so bad”. 79 Here too, this deeper moment of darkness was caused by “the earth’s stasis or tilting of its axis, and was aggravated by a thin cinder dust from the comet”, and the effect of this on the globe caused the “a very extended, gloomy day” 80

Then came the earthquake, and here, too, a progress report, “the earth, forced out of its regular motion, reacted to the close approach of the body of the comet: a major shock convulsed the lithosphere and there was earthquake all over the globe” 62. Ipuwer, again, witnessed all this, reporting and Upper Egypt “has become a waste, all is ruin” 82

Velikovsky in Ukraine, the Angel of Death, N3 4 22

This then set the table for the Passover of the angel of death, Velikovsky translates the word Nogaf as “smote” meaning, a “very violent blow, as, for instance, the goring of a horse by an ox.” The firstborn crushed at midnight, the Haggadah says, represents that smote. 83 But, there was also a night as bright as the noon, and this too is explainable by the progress dynamic of the comet, “the head of the celestial body approached very close, breaking through the darkness of the gaseous envelope” 84 (it is of interest, however, that the 13^th of the month was thereafter bad luck because the first born killing happened on that day, the same day as in traditional Egyptian lore Horus waged war with Seth 85

nogaf the smoter of earth, velikovsky 1940 2 23 22

nogaf the smoter 2 Velikovsky in Ukraine 3 4 22

Nogaf the smoter 3 Velikovksy in Ukraine, 3 4 22

Hurakan Velikovsky 1940 2 23 22

end of part 1.

The discovery of “lycosthene” images in Lycosthenes’ Book of Prodigies and Wonders (1557).

Rev., Jan 26, 2022.

A brief, “we interrupt this program” note, on discovering a possible something in Lycosthenes’ (Conrad Wolfhart, Lycosthenes was his latinized humanist name), Prodigies and Wonders (1557) (which I came to this time by way of Jacque Vallee’s Wonders in the Sky). The book is a picture book of images of such wonders, and image by image, I have seen them extracted and shown as an example of the subject at hand. A picture of a man scooping up blood crosses with his cloak comes from this book, as does all sorts of images of Blemmyes, and other exotic deformations of human beings. Such pictures are used by rationalists to demonstrate how superstitious, and no doubt racist etc, human beings in premodern times were (compared to our enlightened modern times!). But when you page through, and see the images on the page, in context with the Latin describing them, it becomes apparent that something else is going on.

For one thing, each image is simple as a stamp pad image, if the ark, then an ark, crosshatched by pouring rain; if an exotic person, that person’s body twisted this way or that within the given square of the stamp pad size; more importantly, if something in the sky, then a shooting star, or a burst of fire, or three plumes of smoke coming up out of Sodom; if a forest fire, a few plumes; a volcano, seven plumes, each tossing a rock; God appears in the same sort of fiery plume in the sky, out of an opening in the middle of the image; Moses leads the Israelites through a Red Sea consisting of two tall jets of water in midprint; stones or hail falls on a town eightfold from four-fluffed clouds; a shooting star zooms horizontally through a redoubt between two curls of cloud; a burst of sunlight out of a fold of cloud; in another one, a clatter of weapons in the sky, framed by the clouds; a great rock falling from heaven, inside a rainstorm, but opposite a sunburst; one sunlight descent looks almost like a ribbon on a medal; and it goes on.

What this indicates is that each image does not so much as illustrate the book, or even really illustrate, in the formal sense, the scene described, but simply provides a visual prompt to how the reader should be visualizing something, or where at least one should start. They serve almost like historiated initials in illuminated manuscripts, prompts to help with visualization. As such it strikes me that each is more like what today is called an emoji, and simply a more visualized form of the text, for the purpose of coming closer to the reader. It seems there is a vocabulary too, and a whole alphabet of such scenes. They have a generic quality, because they are as if letters.

It then also strikes me that if they aid visualization then they do so at a very incipient, that is, at the beginning level, again, they are prompts, not full expressions. Their presence, and more so, inserted into the text, raises the question of what exactly people thought went through their minds when at last exposed to the words of a book and then having to figure out what is going on inside their heads as they read, in terms of seeing the image. This brings us to compare the zone of reading-visualization to the zone of redreaming in one’s head after watching a movie, and then the relation of both to the imagery that can fill one’s head after one closes one’s eyes to try to get to sleep. The latter I call entoptic imagery, and a vocabulary is developing. In recent analysis, I gave names to the Green Chainlink

The Blue Cathedral

 and the Starry Sky

all of which can, according to my theory, then help you drift off, or not, moving down across the in-between into actual light sleep, hypnagogy. By placing these images in the context of visualization in the entoptic zone of mental imaging, one also proposes that at bottom they do not represent what they represent but in fact are psychodynamic representations of various states or twists of mental imaging in the abstract, then figured out. It is also true that the power of visualization to come up with different images is limited by the pool of fluid in which it is manifest, meaning that there is an inherent tendency toward the nonfigurative toward the lightshow explosive effect, and then, too, my use of figures to give form to inner dream dynamics is physiologically validated by the fact that entoptic imagery is often self-generated from the fissures in an irrepressible figurative form.

Moreover, this case becomes more solid, when a second startling fact begins to unfold, upon paging through the book in full. And that is that all of the images or image stamps, or icons, are made use of repeatedly, often, page after page, not only to refer to another instance of a topic as related to the former instance, but also in much more complicated ways. In some cases, five or six such icons are piled up on one page, then a few pages later, two or three are repeated, and repeated again three pages hence. It is almost as if the author of the text is scoring a script of visual effects to orchestrate a fireworks in the head, which would be what visualization was thought to be, to then cause one to experience the reading of words in a second dimension as the registering of nervous startle-effect or excitement effect, and thus reading is a nodding in and out of the image and the text. It is astonishing, if we posit that the first five image-stamps provided at 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, then you might find in a sequence of tellings, image-stamps repeated to help with the visualization of the event, and it go 1,3,2, then, two pages later, 5,4,3, then two more pages, 2,3,4 and so on. It really is at if they thought of visualization as a series of ZAP maledicta balloon framed devices, to accentuate the experience of the reading or visualizing of the oddity, and that “reading” consisted then of subjecting one’s mind to the strobe or lightning-flashes of such fissure-based imagery that runs on in the head when one reads.

Then, one has a sense of progress through the text, which is never broken by chapter, when one sort of icon subsides, and another gains precedence, then that floods in, then ebbs, and another takes over. It really is an emotional orchestration of internal fireworks of fissures in the entoptic universe. Then, further, when a totally new subject is fed in, that announces the arrival of a new phase. There is a delightfully after-drawing on some images when the rats arrive, they have overdrawn on several images an invasion of rats, to accentuate what is going on.

For me, this breaks images down to psychodynamic graphs, but in an isolated, singularized iconic presentation. So, for example, if I created icons for the various stages of the Eldritch formation, this would involve graphs like this

The first nightmare

The second nightmare

The third nightmare

The truth shot

or if I simply reduce to icons conventional aspects of my system as it has worked out over time,

the Bridge, the Luor, the Village of Dreams (would be like in the book assaulted by storms and lightning), the Forest of Lost Thought, The Hanged woman, the Black Bog, Utrilloi, etc.

This then posits that there must be some secondary purpose for telling history in the way it is told and that is to actually curate the mind of the viewer to accept as the world an expanse in space and time which equals to the expanse created in the entoptic eye and visualizing mind and thus the book as a whole is actually mind-curating the limits of one’s imaginings. As such, then, one’s mind is imagined to be a sequence, in a series of, of visualization effects, which keep exciting one as one reads. A variation on the argument, in a different sense. How?

An example. Lately, since two ER visits in the Fall, I have been I have been put on some meds to attack my chronic sinusitis again. The meds might be working. But the extent of it thus far is limited. That is, I think I can smell things, but the smells are odd, almost not there, unidentifiable. It strikes me that the meds ensemble have cast me into their half life and now I live in a world of half smells, smells, but not really smells, it is like I live in world of pastels, very light colorings, roughly sketched in, like a Bonnard painting, and this befogging, but with a cut in it to hoped for clarity, encircles space in a way that gives my current little regime of routines a sick day feel, which is slightly pleasant, And because it circles me with vague, half-formed impressions, and this foggy state, kind of like a fugue on the symbolic level of dreaming, but rather more ambient, so this is the state I call Snow Mountain, a benign ambient POV which looks back on the dream through a mist and a fog, and sees impressions of this sort.

I have argued, earlier, that the predilection of Germans to see sky armies and blood rain in the sky, was likely induced by a regime of mediation upon their minds; that is, printing, which made of the space between ground and air an in-between wobble space, where in fact they were in a state of perhaps syngogy, unsure if awake or asleep, on our terms,

and thus they saw excitations from within their minds out in the sky; and now Lycosthenes it turns out orchestrates what they see by the paging of the book (so it related to angelspace too). I will have to find a translation, to see what each icon “means” and then translate those into psychodynamic graphs, and from that recreate what it is the author imagined was going through his readers’ minds as they worked their way through his special curations of their mind. I will call all such sky visions as conjured by this sort of icon “lycosthenes” to indicate their iconic origin and conventional nature. A lycosthene is also a conventional image-stamp devised to create a certain visual effect, like a firework for the reading mind. The usage will be as follows, “No, Germans in the sixteenth century did not believe in Blemmyes, a blemmye was a lycosthene image created in support of a text to create inner mental excitement engaged in this new-fangled thing, reading a book.”

Needlesstosay, I might find behind the pictures, only uncertainty, that is, that they too lived in the foo.

Index

Here I collect all instances of skyward wonders in Lycosthenes, identify them as a type of psychodynamic, and then create a comparable example from my vocabulary.

So here, a dark sun

five page turns later, again, same graphic, different event

five more, again

then, the next page, again

that one has a man with a cow on an altar, opposite

which appears on the next page

then again, four more turns

here is one when two symbols are up on the left, repeated lower right

rain twice

and on the next page, accompanied by other acoustics

then again on the next

Some schema run through the whole of it, this sunshine burst

repeats on the next page

and again on the next, likely to give a whole sequence of horrors a thematic unity over the course of a few pageturns

two more, and again

two more again, with a doubling up of the sky is falling

then, six, seems the start of a new chapter, a double 

Which is enough to prove the point.

Sometimes the double page spread has up to eight such stamp images, resulting in a look more like a modern magazine than a book

nine

It is acknowledged that a limited supply of prints were used to illustrate repeatedly different objects. But surely that is incidental. It seems to me that there is a certain degree of orchestration of effects here, it almost feels like Tommy telling his story in Goodfellas, ping, bang, pow, zim, zam, or the sequence of BAMS and SLAPS that in maledicta balloons provided the visual acoustics for a fight in the old Batman television program. If, so, almost related to impresse, these are emblems that bespeak a certain type of routine fear enlisted in a repertoire form to keep the reader ever wary and on the edge of fear. One can almost see in the images a dictionary of historiated letters, speaking of the horrors of the time. I am, of course, in the current interest, partial to signs of wonders in the skies.

There is the full sun

the torch in the sky

this one, not sure what in fact it is

the rain

more rain

rocks falling?

triple suns, twice

another sun

the flood

is this a compound, meant to be read the latter on top of the former?

the sky swords and weapons

a favorable star

manna from heaven

sky fire

this one is torches in heaven

an avalanche?

the smoke of sodom seems to belong to the corpus of sky signs

a different sun

arrows in the sky

a great wind, the implication being a prodigy birth predicted it

the god burst than knocked st Paul off his horse

this strange object in the sky, which brought me here

I think that these serve more in the manner of emojis or emblems to simple signal to the reader what kind of response is required, eeked out of the Latin justification, in terms of visualizing, and as visualizing from reading was a new mental experience for most it had to be learned, or trained in, what is going on the page. And the same used to simply cause in the reader certain bursts of nervous response that got them excited,or brainwashed them into believing something in the text.

But, then, to take it further, I wonder if this orchestration of visualization, all of which, since it is emblematic, taking place on the symbolic level, either vigilogogic, or dropping to hypnagogic, in an emblem space, which is like letterspace, if these signs are not also formatted as shorthand for psychodynamic mental functions that I have discovered to be common in movies etc over the last few years. To repeat the symbols, I then suggest a possible parallel psychodynamic There is the full sun

is this, the High Light ?

the torch in the sky

is the torch, symbol of a vector turned on, and penetrating the ambient?

this one, not sure what in fact it is

could this be the Blue Sun as it passes through the Luor, to see death

This raises the possibility, that if you go back to the icon for rain, and then follow through, the whole book might be mapping out for you a psychodynamic sequence, with the intent to as if hypnotize you. At present, this is guesswork, requiring translation and matching, to continue. But, if this is what is going on, on each page, the author making use of acoustic effects to prompt the mind of the viewer to visualize the current state of the world in a certain way, to get an emotional rise from them, this would mean that each double-spread is as if a score of a soundtrack or saccade stream, to make the words mean something. Something like this.

(which reminds me of thoughtforms too), and thus I could “read” the score in this way. What this means is it is the purpose of these stamps to give visual form to the basic metaphors that inform the discourse of the book and the times, and which form as well the basic building blocks of prejudice or whatever in the narrow minds of the brainwashed. It means that this book is more like a magazine, or even a comic book, in making use of a shorthand symbolism, not to “illustrate” the text, but to prompt the reader to visualize what is in the text in a certain conventional way, to strike home with a reader, resulting in a reaction. This reading also relates this type of book to the art of motion picture closeup montages, and to the art of fashioning a sound effect or score for that, it is protocinematic.

Also, as media, these items are percussive, and exclamatory, and thus represent a book come in close to the conjure phase, when such soundings begin, meaning that reading this you are closed in on by media, to alarm and alert you, just like the news does these days. Thus, I place this study in the symbolic zone, of the hypnagogic, in the bigger picture of the psychodynamics of original prints.

Finally, if these are letters, and considered as if basic building blocks, then they also amount to hieroglyphics, as per Renaissance thought, and thus exist IN nature below human consciousness, that is, in a place more primal and prototype and “immediate” and thus these symbols are ALSO the original ancestral form of foo photos as I am currently looking at them.

In foo photos, I am still collecting types, to encompass a vocabulary of effects. The overall purpose derives from my interest in the false certainty with which captions in 70s paperbacks are assigned to photos with deadpan nature. The craziness of certain wild claims in captions then creates a gap between the claim and the photo, that is the lacunum, and it is back through that that one drops to the prototype space of media, which is the foo. The foo is, it must be, OUTSIDE human agency, preceding human agency, and thus in some way miraculous. It is from the premise of the foo that one then builds back a different kind of consciousness, based on clairvoyance as it coincides with dream theory, and the stages of consciousness there, I am interested in the way people, in the context of legend trips, step aside from the given conventions of art, and presentation, in rational culture, that is, the mainstream, an keep to inhabit a prototype space by finding wiggle room in which to portray immediacy in a foo lacunum. Last night I saw in a book that people devoted to the discourse are still busily adding to the types, which I am trying to catalog.