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Techno-Babylon w⧸Dr. Zach Porcu - Out of This World #77
01:22:42
Dr Porcu joins to discuss the occult symbolism in the movie Metropolis (1927), and his series on The Dark Logos, Feminism and Techno-paganism.
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I drive my bus in a busy city. That's why road safety is so important to me. I know that I must slow down
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and be extra careful when I make a wide turn.
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Buses need more room than cars. Everyone can help keep our roads safe.
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Next time you're driving, remember to give
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buses plenty of time and space to finish turning before driving ahead. Let's all plan to share the road safely. Learn how at www.sharetherodesafely.gov. welcome back, everybody. I'm so excited because today we have a super special new guest whose content blew me away. And that doesn't really happen very often, but his name is Dr. Zachary Porku and he is a catechist at St. Andrew's Church in Riverside. He has a YouTube channel, a substack, and he also does work for Ancient Faith radio. So welcome, Dr. Zach. How are you?
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B
I'm good. Thank you for having me on.
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So the first time I ever heard of you was actually a friend of mine or a friend of this channel, rather. Paul hall, who has done several shows with me about occult, Disney and Gnosticism and Carl Jung. He sent me a link of one of your videos and it was just about feminism. And I have to be honest, I was like, because that topic is so annoying now, I think the discourse around the whole thing is just gone really crazy out of hand. But I gave it a chance. He said, I don't think there's anything in there that would offend your sensibility. So, like, okay, I trust you, Paul. And actually an update about him, he after he appeared on our channel a bunch of times, he decided he wanted to become an icon writer. So we sent him off to school and now he is painting in San Jose. He's very happy. He might have time for us down the road to come back. But we got Dr. Zach here for now and maybe later on if he'll come back, if he has a good time. So everybody be really nice to Dr. Zach because he has done such a tremendous job in fleshing out all of these different. Things that we're coming up against here in the culture and especially feminism. So I watched that whole one and I did. I don't want to, like, get too deep into that because we're going to talk about Metropolis, the occult movie. And it was so interesting because I felt like the movie encapsulated so many of the points that you were hitting on in your series. So, Dr. Zach, I watched all the feminism, I watched all the secularism, I watched a techno paganism. There's so many oh, dark logos. I did all the dark logos. So I'm definitely one of your students now and I know I'm talking so much because I'm really excited. I'm going to let you get to it in a second. But I took so many notes on feminism because I'd never heard it express explained that there's like different ideas and different kinds and the, the beginning of the story actually starts out in the Industrial revolution and the attitudes about women. So hopefully as we go along in Metropolis, you can drop some of those things in there because that is very much about industrialization. Right?
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Yeah, that. I mean it's a lot about a lot of things, but, but industrialism, the imagery, it's all over the film.
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Yeah, so I know that was a lot and you're brand new here, but welcome. And so let's just like get right into it because Metropolis itself is a German expressionist movie and that's relevant because this was the first to display satanic imagery in film. And if you know anything about JNI's work, we are movie detectives. The occult movie detectives. Right. We have three books on esoteric Hollywood. I have three books on culture creation in pop culture, like. And that's why I'm excited to see your new series on that. But so German expressionist film was a favorite of this guy right here who we've talked about, old Anton. Oh yes, Anton lavey.
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There he is.
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Yes, the creator of the Church of Satan in 1966. Now in my member section we actually have his whole biography that I did. I keep a little posted on the COVID of it because there is a whole chapter in here about synthetic companions in androids which he believed would be larger in the future than even cars would be. Is that something that you're seeing materialize?
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Oh, I mean I, I follow since the Dark Logos and Techno Pagan series, people just keep sending me news stories about people falling in love with AI. I'm sure you've seen all this stuff. People and you know, self harm occurring because of some of these things in the worst cases. So you know, the, the lure to believe that this talking thing is a person and then to become emotionally invested and it just seems irresistible.
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And it's also some kind of like a narcissistic mirror that just mirrors back to you everything that and all, including your psychosis and your mental illness. It will just exacerbate all of that, right?
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Oh yeah. I mean if you have to read just, you know, one of these stories of where they do a deep dive on somebody who fell prey to AI psychosis and how their life fell apart. And it's really just very sad.
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And you, you coined a word to robo d ism.
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Robotheism.
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Robotheism. Right, right, right, yeah. So I don't even know where to start because there's so much. But one last thing I want to say about Anton lavey is they use Metropolis in their rituals. So there's actually, along with the Satanic Bible, there's this satanic rituals booklet that like explains how to do all of these. Right. And the one called the Law of the Trapezoid uses electricity and magnetism and Oregon energy which is. I don't know if you know what that is. It's just sexual energy basically. So there was a Wilhelm Reich wrote all this stuff and he called it Orgone. So that's what they're working. Working with in here and non Euclidean geometry. So those angles that you see in Metropolis and in the German Expressionist films, you know, it's like dream like they are utilizing that too. And that goes into the Law of the Trapezoid because they. It's a truncated pyramid basically. And they're using the expressionistic decor to utilize science fantasy cinema of the early 20th century. So that's exactly what Anton Lavey is talking about here. Metropolis is also on the Temple of Set reading list. I don't know if you're familiar with them.
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No, I'm not.
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That's a.
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More.
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Well, Temple of Set was an offshoot of the Church of Satan because there was a lieutenant colonel in the army, Michael Aquino, who didn't think the Church of Satan was satanic enough because they're actually atheistic. So the Temple of Set actually believes in the devil and incarnating him and using electricity, magnetism, technology, mind control. I actually have the book I just got in the mail from that Michael Aquino wrote called Mind War. So it was about set psychological operations in the military. And it gets actually darker than that. But I don't want to derail the show talking about Temple set. Let's just tell me what you think of the opening scene. I mean, the Machine. Because you say in your series that everything is the machine. Leftist, right? All of it is the machine.
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Yeah. And it's. It was hard for me not to. So I never seen this film before and I really. I wish I could have watched it twice before we met. But there's a lot of imagery in here that I thought was. Because it's 1927, I thought this was going to go into more of the Workers revolution type of imagery. And so I wasn't sure what its take on the machine was exactly, because. Because everything is the machine. I mean, communism is. Is the machine too, obviously. And yet you have these kind of workers revolution themes in there. So at the beginning I wasn't sure, but then we get this. What to me was the most startling and therefore kind of great image in the film was when he sees the. The big machine that everyone's working on. And it's a. It's a pyramid shape. And you're sitting there watching and staring at it. You're thinking like this kind of looks like a pyramid with these big steps. And then lo and behold, it's transformed into Moloch and people are going into the mouth and all this stuff and it's like, okay, yes, there it is. And so I was. Obviously, if you've listened to my Dark Lolo series, you can imagine my reaction was I was struck by how much Lewis Mumford's texts connected the machine to something that we wouldn't think of as mechanical, like the pyramids, like the ancient temple building and temple worship and temple sacrifice rites of these ancient people. And so there's a sense in which what technology is bringing us is unprecedented, and there's a sense in which it's not at all unprecedented.
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So you talk about how pyramids and ziggurats are sort of technological mountains that are built for the purpose of coming in contact with spirits or gods or what do you say?
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Yeah, it's. It's. It's very intuitive. I always try to tell my students, you have to try to get into the headspace of an ancient person. Right. So the physical and the spiritual for them are not really separable. And so things that are literally the case, such as being very high up, that also is spiritually high up. So you would go on top of a mountain in order to commune with the gods. The gods are on Olympus. Even the God of gods meets Moses on Sinai. You know, obviously, this is what you do to go up. And so if you don't have that available to you, or if you want it with certain features, you make a mountain of assembly. And the pyramid is sort of this human construct of a holy mountain, which strikes me as dangerous and impious at some level, although obviously they, many ancient cultures thought it was the thing to do. So there's always this sense with the dark logo stuff with the fallen gods, that the fallen gods are trying to help us build up to them and incarnate them down onto the earth. They. They like there's this push, pull, you know, ancient man was a slave to the fallen gods, but also they use him to become more incarnate into the world.
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Yes.
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And so the, the way that this era to me is more unprecedented is unprecedented is that with something like AI and then AI inside robotics. To go back to your first thing about human AI companion, like robot companions, synthetic companions. That seems like the most incarnate we've maybe been ever able to achieve to incarnate fallen gods.
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So you mentioned in. And I just finished this Genesis and the synchronized biblically endorsed extra biblical text. So it's Genesis, Book of Enoch, Jasher and Jubilees in chronological order. So it's filling in lots of gaps. And like, I know you guys this isn't a canon Bible, but it's historical, so we kind of use it. And I know that book Enoch is. I know you guys, okay, we're just having fun. But.
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Well, if I may, what I tell people is you can't. This is also like a Protestant kind of post Protestant idea that there's the holy books and then there's all the ones that are wrong and ancient. They just didn't think like that. I mean, the Church father, the early church fathers cite Enoch like it's authoritative, okay? Not like it's canon. They had that distinction that that just means that the canon is what we measure everything by. And so when Enoch disagrees with the canon or Jubilees, we go with the canon, but where it doesn't, we let it fill in the gaps. I mean, that's how the ancient Christians thought.
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And so there's the story in here that you retell also that the watchers, which were put in charge of humanity, watching over humanity in a good way, they were tempted by the, you know, physical pleasures and they fell and actually went to Mount Hermon and they made this pact, right, that they're all going to do this together and they were going to suffer all the consequences together. And that's one of the first instances where you have like the gods in the mountain, right? In Mount Hermon.
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Yes, yes, they're there. I mean, is that. Does that become a type for Olympus later? I don't know.
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Oh, yeah. So I totally think so. So their Tower of Babel and the pyramids are, like you said, some advanced technology to reach the gods in a way. Like, not exactly physically, like they're in the clouds maybe, but because, you know, demons flow. I watched that one of yours too. The air. The air demons. But where was I going with this? Oh, you can reach someone on a telephone. You're not physically with them, but you have, you know, contacted with them. So maybe these mountains, these pyramids, these ziggurats, later on after the gods had departed, there was still a way to reach them. What do you think?
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Well, I. I guess I would just say that ancients did think of them as physical. Like, that's. I think what's weird for us to conceive of is that if you look at sort of early Christian, like first century origin people like this and second, second, third, and then even some of the pagan sources, BC they do talk in physical terms. Like they talk about how when you put a offering on an altar and you burn it up, the part that you burn up for the deity, that the demon actually floats around in the air and consumes the smoke and the vapor from the sacrifice. And that makes him heavier and allows him to sink down closer to the earth because otherwise if he gets hungry, then he. And starve, then he floats back up and he can't, you know, so there's all these like meteorological kinds of description of them that go into great. They go into too much detail for me to read this and go, oh, he's being metaphorical.
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Mm.
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So I don't know.
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Well, that makes sense too, because you can bring a demon inside of you in the voodoo religion just by supplicating it with its favorite liquor or its cigarette or its food or whatever it likes. Right. And so how they think of it is a person riding a horse and you are the horse and you're inviting the demon to come and ride you for a time being. Right.
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Wow, I didn't know that part about voodoo. Oh yeah, it's similar. It's similar to what, you know, the ancient Greco Roman world would have said, which is that, you know, you have a pneuma that's in you demonic possessions where the demons who are made of gas, they go. Their pneuma goes into your body and pushes your pneuma out. And then your pneuma is like floating around your body trying to get back in.
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Huh. We did a really interesting show about parasites and demonic activity too, how those are kind of parallel. So maybe you wouldn't want to be interested in that. But back to Metropolis and the machine. So the, the beginning of the movie is they're showing you a very stratified society, right? You have the above people and you have the below people. It's very H.G. wells and the above people live in Eden or Utopia type. It kind of looks like Dr. Seuss, Eden. Did you like the sets and everything? I like old movies. What do you think?
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B
The set design is amazing, but I think for silent films it has to be because that's what. That's what carries so much of the content. Yeah, yeah. They're literally in a garden up there. I did immediately think of the time machine and H.G. wells with the Eloy and the Morlocks. I was like, hey, yeah, I did.
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Yeah. Did you have any notes on, like, Eden and Utopia? Because in one of your series, you talk about how there is no such thing as Utopia and how a lot of our modern secularism is based on this idea that is just not a thing.
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Yeah, because we. It's the way I've talked about a lot of secular progressivism, liberalism, whatever you want to call it, is that it's a Christian heresy. So it takes these ideas from Christianity and then tries to make a parody of them. And on point with the theme of this film and with all this in general, we try to use these artificial means to substitute for the real thing. So instead of the kingdom of heaven, which is coming, we're going to build a secular version of the kingdom of heaven on Earth with technology. That's why technology is such a religious. It's such a central religious commitment for the progressive, secular person. Technology must be advanced because that's how we're going to bring in the secular eschaton. And so it's no surprise that on the top of this society, there is an idyllic garden. And they're running around like children and, like, playing tag and stuff. It's very childish, even though there's just kind of a, you know, sexual undertone there. But it's very childish and idyllic. And it's called the. The Sons Club. So. Children.
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Yeah. Club of the Sun.
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But then under it is all of these machines creating. Trying to make this fake paradise.
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And the machines aren't just machinery, they're actually made of human beings. So I think that's part of the metaphor of the movie, is that it's not just like metal and gears. There's actually human flesh supporting this whole utopia. Right. So, yeah, it's very childlike. He's kind of like in the Garden of Pan, and he is playing with his little girlfriend. And then he has this apparition, a Marian apparition. Now, I know Metropolis has Christian overtones, but it also is very gnostic in some ways, so it's not orthodox. We're not saying that, but he has a Marian apparition. And she appears to him.
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Her name is Maria. Yeah.
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And she's saying, these are your brothers and they're in slavery. So now we have some Moses flavors going into it, like, you know, rescuing the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. Right?
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B
Yeah. But it's. I don't know if this is jumping ahead, but it. That. That was a part that was. I was waiting to see where this was going because it's 1927, you know, communism's in the water. The horrors of the industrialism are in everybody's faces. People are worried about this. And so. As well it should be. And so I was waiting to see, like, okay, what is the take of the workers revolution that this movie is going to have? And I was not expecting and pleased to see that the take was not to destroy the ruling class. And it wasn't to even to disdain the ruling class because it's not at the end, of course we're spoiling it. But, you know, everybody comes together and it's all about unity. And so the. The foibles of both of the ruling class and the lower class are on full display because the lower classes act ridiculous and stupid. They forget their children and they, you know, their kids almost die and they're just. They look, they are portrayed as kind of being idiotic and prone to. Prone to being riled up and losing their minds. And then, of course, the ruling class is, you know, portrayed horribly as. As you can tell. And so why am I saying all this? Because with this scene, I was like, okay, where is this going? She has all the kids. It's very sympathetic. It's very. Not subtle. Metropolis is not subtle at all about anything.
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Yeah.
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And so it almost sets you up for a workers revolution. Destroy the rich, look at the poor. You know, won't somebody think of the children? All that's what I was expecting when. When this scene hit me. And then what we got was something else.
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A
Well, one last thing before we leave. The beginning opening scenes of the stratified society is. I'm pretty sure you've probably talked about Al Shukroli in your pop culture series. Right.
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B
Okay, so, well, in on the other ones, we're not yet at Crowley.
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A
Oh, okay. Where's my phone? Oh, so there is something called Liber Oz. Oz, you know, like wizard of Oz. And it is basically, it's considered the political program of Thelema. So Thelema means will. It's the Greek word for will. It's their religion. Right. And Liber Oz. Let me pull this up real quick. It's all about a stratified society and the slaves shall serve. And. No, it's not pulling up.
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B
Crowley wrote this.
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It seems like the Libras.
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Yeah.
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Okay, here it is. So do without. Will shall be the whole of law, the law of the strong. That is our law. So it's very Doctrine of will and force and the ideas of the German, like Ubermensch and the Vril Society and the Thule Society Dominion that you talk about. And there's the last line. It says, the slaves shall serve. So this is what Crowley would want. A very stratified society with the ultra rich and the super poor basically, you know, just working cogs in a machine. And the aristocracy would benefit from that. So there's a little. The last line. Slave shall serve. And then AL258. So AL means book of the law. And if you go to that, it's really interesting because it is a passage that is like the opposite of the, you know, the Rich man and Lazarus story. The last shall be first. So this is an inversion of that where it says, therefore the kings of the earth shall be kings forever. The slaves shall serve. There is none that shall be cast down or lifted up. All is ever as it was. And so it's an inversion of, you know, the. What's going to happen in the eschaton? Do you agree with that?
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B
Right. Wow, that's so crazy. It's always. It always shocks me how just straightforward. These occultists are like. You can just find their primary sources and read them and they're like, yep, we're just gonna do this. And everybody's like, cool. You know, it's very strange. And it makes sense because if you're doing the kind of. Not necessarily might makes right, but the. The will to power element that's kind of at the heart of all of this miserific vision type of stuff. Do you read Screwtape letters? You remember his.
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A
I just did a show on my member section about that. So, yeah, I have.
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Nice. Yeah, I had a subscriber who was bringing this up, if you remember. Screwtape has this thing that he calls the miserific vision, which is the opposite of the beatific vision. And it's based on this idea of basically radical individualism and power and that. He's like, this is the only thing that makes sense. It's completely intuitive. This is how nature is. This is how objects are. One object can't exist in the same space as another object in these very. Like, Oxford dawn about explaining this. But his point is that love is impossible and therefore the strong and the conquering need to rule. And I just, I'm unsurprised that I see this here and everywhere I look. That's related to 19th and 20th century occultism.
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A
Yeah, that made a big impression on me. Because he didn't believe that God could love. Screwtape didn't. Because he was incapable of it in himself.
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B
Yeah.
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Right. So he couldn't even believe in it. But this movie is about love. And, and it's about, like they say, the head and the body have to come together in the heart space. And that's kind of close to what you would say in cataclysm class with the, you know. Right. What do you say?
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B
Yeah, I mean, and I was wondering when. Actually I'm going to look this up right now because C.S. lewis, obviously, he makes this exact image in Abolition of Man. And I think that's. I mean, that is after. I'm wondering how much after 1943. So I don't know. Did Lewis see this movie? But it's. But I mean, this, this image is not unique. I mean, the, the tripart division of the person is ancient. It's pre Christian. So the. And. But in Metropolis they talk about the head and the hands because the emphasis is on the who does the work.
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A
Right.
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B
I was wondering if there was some significance in that because it doesn't say like the mind and the body, which is what you said, which is the ancient take on it. But in Metropolis they say that like the head and the hands.
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Okay.
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So it's like who controls who's doing the thinking work and who's doing the manual labor. And that's how we're going to organize a machine society. That's the concern of an industrial society
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A
is whose vision are we all manifesting? Right.
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B
Yeah. That's an important question.
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A
Right. Because like they even say deep below the Earth's surface, as far below is. That is how far above the aristocracy is. So there's a giant gap, which it. It's not like it couldn't happen again. And we're looking at some dominoes falling in our own culture that could, you know, make this more of a reality. So the, the worker cities below the Earth, They complete compete in games. So they're very like the Greeks with the Olympic Games and, you know, the Romans and their games.
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B
Can I make a quick prediction? May bounce this off of you? Because something that I was thinking because you said, because you said, I don't know why this couldn't happen again, you know, this kind of stratification. And I was thinking about that a lot while I was watching the movie because I thought the. The overt reality of class distinctions has kind of gone away in a lot of the modern American mind or the more the Western mind, because the middle class is so large and a lot of the work that we do is like desk work and white collar stuff. And so the radical aristocracy and guy in the factory thing has gone. Not that it doesn't exist, but that it's really seems to have come off of people's radars. It's not like the image that we think about when we think about the working class these days, like it was in the 20s. And so I thought about. I was like, okay, well, where are the class distinctions? Because they didn't just vanish. And here's my. Tell me what you think of this. My concern is that what modernity does is it does all the things that we used to do in the past, but it makes them invisible. So a class distinction that I think is happening right now that is largely invisible is with the use of AI. So I'm. I'm concerned that very soon, historically, like in a decade, there's going to be two classes of people basically in developed countries, those who can think without machine assistance and those who can't. And that's a very real class distinction that will be completely invisible if you're trying to measure it by standards of material wealth. Same with debt. Like everybody can have all the dumb stuff that they want, but this person's $50,000 in credit card debt and is going to be a SL life forever and this person's not. That's another invisible class distinction.
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A
Well, speaking of technology taking people's labor and making it invisible, can you speak a little bit about industrialization and feminism and what you call the feminism of care and the difference between, you know, radical, weird feminism and the idea that women still have value even if their things that they create have been taken over by industrialization.
- [30:43]
B
Yeah. So. So disclaimer. I basically stole this from Mary Harrington, who did the historiography on it. And as soon as she said it, I was like, of course that's. That's exactly right. So she coined, as far as I know, she coined the terms feminism of care and feminism of freedom to describe what she sees as two different movements within the very early, what you might call feminist movement. But what is it? And she says what should be obvious, I think, to everybody, which is that feminism is a reaction to industrialism. And the problem is that prior to industrialism, when you're not really that dependent on cash. Like, we're totally dependent on cash. We don't. We're not able to make things in the house, but not like they did. But, you know, prior to cash economy, I like, the women and children just made, I don't know, like, 75% of the stuff you use in the home. The women were boiling lye and making soap. The women made all the clothes in the entire culture. The women made. I mean, women could. Women were an economic force, to put it in modern economic terms. So when industrialism comes. And so therefore they're not materially dependent on their husbands, a lot of times the husbands are materially dependent on women in these kind of conditions where, like, you're pioneering, you have to have women at home processing things while you're doing other stuff, or there's no food.
- [32:05]
A
Yeah, well, to speak on that real quick, it was funny. We went to Jamestown a couple months ago and there's a giant plaque. And basically the gist of it was, everything sucked before the women got here, and we love them and thank God for women. So I liked it.
- [32:21]
B
Oh, yeah. I mean, anybody who's ever been a parish for any amount of time knows that there's this cadre of old ladies who basically runs everything and makes everything possible. And the only reason there's food at coffee hour, priests, vestments, or it's like. And that was the whole economic reality prior to the industrial revolution. Not that men weren't essential also in other ways, blah, blah, blah. But the point is that when industrialism happens, and it's weird because one of the first industries to get industrialized is textiles, which was the main thing, one of the main things that women did. So all the work from women is taken away from them. Now women can't do things in the home that was like, well, we can just buy this for cheap. And so it shifts everything from a home. Would you call it cottage industry, basically, to a cash economy. And so there's two reactions that you could have to this. I'm going to overgeneralize slightly. One is what Harrington calls the feminism of care, which says, look, just because what women can produce is being taken away by the machine doesn't mean women still aren't valuable for all the things that cannot be quantified by cash. Which is good, because people should not be quantified by cash.
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A
Right.
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B
But then the other reaction is, no, we need to reshape women into something that can also go to the factory and not have to Take care of kids, to increase our production. In other words, embracing and doubling down on the. Know you're valued for what you can produce in the cash economy thing. And Harrington, I think, believes that this, the first one, the feminism of care, basically died before first wave feminism was even over. So it was very early. And then it got taken over by a feminism that a lot of people call radical feminism. But all of it is radical feminism after that. Because what's radical about it? It's. It's trying to basically delete the female from the species. That's what its project is.
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A
It's an attack on biology, like you said, through birth control. And now robo wombs or whatever they're going to come out with now. Like. Yeah, yeah. So erasing women and their value in people's minds. And it's in there in Metropolis. It's like the workers are marching in and the old shift is coming out and they're all broken and down, but it's just lines passing each other of human resource, really. Right. And so now we've got all the women in the workforce and when they were in the factories and part of the machine. Right. This machine that we're gonna see in just a minute. He equates this with Moloch.
- [35:16]
B
Yeah, right, yeah. I mean, and you have to. The image of putting people into the mouth of Moloch is actually a very old image. So I, I read so much and talk to so many people. You have to forgive me, I forget where I, where I hear or read this from. But there was a. My understanding is that we have archaeological evidence of a idol to Moloch that. Because if people don't know, I mean, Moloch was a, was a God of child sacrifice. Very brutal, bloodthirsty God. Krumkruic is the Gaelic that the druids worshiped in, in Britain. Same God. And this idol of him had a big mouth just open like the thing and hands outstretched like this. And what you would do is you would bring your living baby and put it in the hand of the thing. And then the hand, I mean, you can say that there was a priest of Moloch in the back pulling a lever or you can leave whatever you want, but the hand would do this and it would tumble down into. To be immolated and people did this. There were cultures that built that machine and they did that kind of thing. These are the kind of cultures that the Romans thought were barbarians and they destroyed them.
- [36:38]
A
Carthage. Yeah.
- [36:40]
B
Yes, yes, exactly.
- [36:44]
A
So I'm looking at these Masks that you just made me think of. Have you seen anything like this?
- [36:54]
B
No. So these are, I mean, it looks like a goblin mask.
- [36:56]
A
Yeah. These would be the masks of the priests of Carthage and Molech. And they would have to wear these.
- [37:00]
B
Okay. Yeah.
- [37:03]
A
Creepy, right?
- [37:05]
B
Oh, very, very. So ancient even the Romans want to exterminate you. You're not doing.
- [37:12]
A
Yes. If you're scaring them, then you're pretty scary. So. Yeah. Moloch has this staircase that looks like a ziggurat, the ritualistic temple. The technology that you talk about to get in touch with the gods. The priestcraft becomes this technological class that is above everybody. Right.
- [37:37]
B
Controller class.
- [37:38]
A
Yes. And even the father. So you have a Freder who is kind of like the Christ character and his father who's very demiurgy because he's the one that created this whole thing. Jaw, or Joe was his name. Right. And he thinks that the workers belong in the depths. He doesn't have this pricked conscience like Freder has when he sees the conditions of the workers.
- [38:08]
B
Yeah. Where they belong. I, I, the German, the German kept jumping out at me as I was watching this movie and, and the depths, they keep saying te. And I kept thinking of tling, which is where we get that. If you know what a tling is, what is it? Oh, okay, I see you do not play Dungeons and Dragons. That's probably okay.
- [38:31]
A
I never know. Never have.
- [38:33]
B
No. Tieflings are like these kind of, they look like devils, basically. They have horns and pointy tails and they're like fallen elf type characters. And so a tiefling from German mythology is like a name for it, for a devil and so depth and teeth. I don't know if this was intentional. I just, it struck me as there was a constant connection to like the being in the depths is Hades. I think there's a lot of imagery that enforces that. And that's where Malik is too.
- [39:02]
A
Yeah, he definitely is having a catabasis down there, isn't he? Because he has to go and trade places with a worker. So he sees how bad the inequality is and he feels bad and he goes down and he gives a worker his clothes and his money to trade. Lives with him, basically. And I actually watched one that had some lost found footage in it. And the found footage was the little scenes of the worker and what he does with the money when he finds it in his pocket.
- [39:36]
B
Yeah, I saw the long one with all the restored frames in it. Yeah.
- [39:42]
A
So he, he goes out partying with flappers and weird looking ladies Right.
- [39:50]
B
They are very weird. The costuming is so crazy.
- [39:53]
A
Yeah. And he goes out gambling. And then meanwhile, in the middle of Metropolis. Now. Now we're getting into the sorcery part. Is the Strange Medie House of Rotwang, the inventor. What did you think of that character?
- [40:12]
B
He's such a classic trope at this point. And I was like, oh, it's this guy. But then I fell out of my chair when there was a pentagram over all his doors. Yeah, well, it was because. Because the scientist and the sorcerer are the same. They're the same archetype. And I've been. I've been saying a lot of that on my substack recently. I just. Yesterday. Oh, no. Today's reflection post, I talked about Somnium. Do you know this? Johannes Kepler, Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan think that the first work of science fiction was written by Kepler in 1612 or something.
- [40:50]
A
Okay.
- [40:50]
B
And it's called Somnium the Dream. And it's about how Kepler has this dream about this boy who learns astronomy, whose mother is a witch who summons a demon that takes them to the moon. So it's the first space travel story. Yay. Where's my. How do they do it? Demon. They literally summoned a demon to take
- [41:11]
A
him to the moon.
- [41:12]
B
Yeah.
- [41:13]
A
Oh, I lost my pen because I want to write this down, but. Okay, what's the. Tell me the name of the book again.
- [41:18]
B
Somnium. I'll send it to you.
- [41:19]
A
Somnium. Okay. That is crazy. I never heard of that.
- [41:22]
B
It's. It's like 14 pages, and it's. It was included in a anthology of, like, science fiction across the ages. And it's. I mean, it's demonic anyway. Yeah. So, yeah, the sorcerer and the scientists, they're the same, basically. They are. They have. They play the same mythological role in modernity. And so the pentagram, I don't know what people think about this, but traditionally, it's been used in a lot of different contexts and has had a lot of different meanings historically. Generally, I think in the west understood to be the four elements, and then spirit is the fifth element, you know, pointing up. So then why. Why is it upside down when we get to the machine, the machine robot person. And I. I wondered about that, because it's sort of like. I don't. I think it might be anachronistic to read it as the way that Anton Lavey inverted the pentagram because, you know, as, you know, he inverted the pentagram because he was a materialist, and he wanted to say that Matter, the four elements are higher than spirit, but it's right side up on all of Rot Mike's doors because that's who he is. But then it's pointing down. So maybe that means that the spirit is going down into the. It's the incarnation.
- [42:42]
A
That is exactly what it means. Yeah, I mean he would say that, I'm sure in here. So yeah, the inverse pentagram they call it. If it's right side up, it's also the body of man. Four arms and head. Head, yeah, towards God, pointing towards heaven. Right. And so if you turn it upside down, your body is upside down, head towards God and you get the extra added horns of a goat. Yes, pointing up.
- [43:10]
B
Very cute.
- [43:11]
A
So yeah, Rotwing. He, he's very Faustian. Right. So you talk a lot about how we are in this Faust, Faustian age and you identified three different ages. Can you like really quickly, like just recap what the three ages were from Spangler?
- [43:27]
B
I think it was, yeah, the normal sort of academic ages are ancient, medieval and modern. But, but, but Spangler says, well yes, there's the ancient classical world, but then instead of medieval and modern, he says that there's the Magian age, which he kind of identifies basically with Byzantium, where the spiritual is uncovered through things like the Jesus prayer and meditation, monasticism and whatever. And then there's the Faustian age in which we try to do all this dark logo stuff, build our own machine, become our own gods, use knowledge to take power over nature. And what's interesting for Spengler and why a lot of people kind of freaked out about this is because instead of identifying this with let's say the scientific revolution in 1600s, 1700s, he identifies it much, much earlier, much closer to the schism actually. And so he sort of implicates scholasticism, late medieval Catholic scholasticism as a precursor or the beginning of this Faustian age.
- [44:37]
A
And that would be defined by what, like sorcery, using your will, Philema, stuff like that. Right.
- [44:48]
B
To take a bunch of movements and over generalize them. It's something like we're going to use knowledge, we're going to learn the secrets of the universe so that we can take control of the universe and then ultimately our own destinies and evolution.
- [45:05]
A
Have you read Secret Destiny of America? You like that? Put that on your list and it would go good with your American God show, which I haven't watched, but I, I want to watch those two series and then have you back maybe in a couple months if that's okay.
- [45:20]
B
Okay, yeah, I'LL read this and.
- [45:22]
A
And look up Secret destiny of America, too, because.
- [45:28]
B
Manly Hall.
- [45:29]
A
Manly P. Hall. Yeah. And so where are we? Faust, Technology, Sorcery. Obviously, everyone's heard that quote. What is it? Advanced magic is like science or the Arthur C. Clarke quote.
- [45:44]
B
Oh, yes. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I always hated that.
- [45:50]
A
Well, we hate Arthur C. Clarke, so that's good. It's all good.
- [45:55]
B
So we just talked about why we hate him in Monday's show.
- [45:59]
A
Oh, yeah. Okay. Well, I got plenty more ammunition for your hate of that. But so we have Rottwang, and he is the archetype of a Faustian sorcerer, right? The sorcerer's apprentice, Mickey Mouse, that kind of thing. And I actually wrote about this. When did this come out? 2014. So here's Beyonce doing.
- [46:29]
B
Oh, yeah, the Rottweiler.
- [46:30]
A
Okay, so she's got her. What, Cybernetic hand. Oh, yeah, this is my book.
- [46:40]
B
Well, I'm gonna read your book.
- [46:41]
A
Okay, I'll send you one. Very good. So she is. So what we're getting in now is the Scarlet Woman, okay. And also the Whore of Babylon, Ishtar and Nana, Isis, these goddesses. And now it is technological. So you've got this robotic element to the horror of Babylon, and you've got Beyonce doing it just like Rotwang, who he had to sacrifice his own part of his body to animate the robot. So now he's transhuman. Right. And she looks exactly in concert like the Maria. Can you see that?
- [47:22]
B
Mm. Crazy.
- [47:25]
A
Yeah. So they've been doing stuff like that for a long, long time. I mean, this book's already 10 years old. And I have a million other examples of what we're talking about in the Scarlet Woman, but, yeah, anything about that scene, I mean, that's such a, like, classic cinema scene when he's bringing her to life. And the sounds and the electromagnetism. What do you think?
- [47:50]
B
I mean, it's just. It's hard not to see. I think you have to kind of strip your. Your sort of over media prejudice, consumerism view of these things. I mean, I. Because you're like, oh, it's another Frankenstein, Gaia trophy. But I have to remind people, like, this is 1927. Like, why is everybody thinking in these terms? Why? It's. Is it just pop culture? No, not at all. And. And why is it that the ultimate dream of technological man, of the Faustian man, is to make a human? I mean, that that sort of validates that we can replace God, that now we are God, if we can make man and control man. It's very strange because also he brought ruffing brags about how it. The robot follows his exact instructions, is totally obedient to him. So it's like. Is it a power trip? Yeah, but the power trip is part of the worldview of Faustian man, that the purpose of everything is absolute control over space and time and over death. Because the project starts with trying to bring back this woman that died, that they're in love.
- [49:01]
A
Hell. Her name is Hell and she is Fred. Her mom. She's Joe's wife and she was Rotwing's unrequited love. Yeah, I didn't know if you got all. All of that. I've seen Metropolis, like several times, so that's how I know.
- [49:16]
B
Yeah, it was kind of going fast, but I did. I did get all of that and I. What did you think of the name?
- [49:23]
A
Well, that just kind of reminded me of like Hecate and these like chthonic goddesses. Hell, what did you think?
- [49:31]
B
Well, I think Hell is H E L. I think that she is the Norse goddess of the underworld. This is a German movie. So that's like. That's in there. That's in their minds. So now then I thought about that and I was like, so what are we saying here? Is that it's another. It begins with the effort to incarnate a goddess out of desire to. Out of lust. So I'm very reminded of Crowley's obsession with the Scarlet Woman, which I'm sure you know about this.
- [50:04]
A
That's where we're going.
- [50:05]
B
That's where we're going.
- [50:07]
A
That's where the movie's taken us and that's where history has taken us. I never like, set out to learn all this stuff. It was just an accident.
- [50:13]
B
But no, you just wake up one day and then you can't unsee everything.
- [50:17]
A
Oh, yeah, it's like the they Live glasses. Have you seen that movie?
- [50:23]
B
Which movie?
- [50:24]
A
They Live by John Carpenter. Oh, okay, That's a good one for your sci fi series. Write that down. They Live by John Carpenter. Yeah, for sure. So, yeah, the Machine Woman is not completed yet because it needs a likeness of a real woman. Right. And meanwhile, they are having some type of gospel meetings in the catacombs down below. Yeah, the workers are being elevated and enlightened a little bit by the bringing of the gospel by this girl, Maria, this pious, you know, the archetype of the good, good girl.
- [51:16]
B
Right, like the Marian archetype. Yeah, because she's in heralding that the mediator is going to come. She kind of plays this heralding role that the Theotokos plays. It's light. I mean, it's not. It's not one to one, but that's what I thought of. And then Savior comes through. The Savior comes through a woman. That's Sarcole.
- [51:39]
A
Right. And the father and Rotwang are in cahoots to keep the status quo. Right. So you've got Fredor, the son, who wants to sort of equalize things a little bit in this society. And then these other. The sorcerer and the Demiurge are, like, in a conspiracy to keep everything the way it is by kidnapping Maria and giving her likeness to the robot.
- [52:08]
B
Yeah. The human sacrifice element is essential for all Faustian sorcery. It's just. It has to be this way.
- [52:17]
A
Well, speak to that for a second, because I just wrote a whole book on human sacrifice.
- [52:24]
B
The. Well, I mean, it's weird because sacrifice, at some level, is something very intuitive to humans. Like, you have to sacrifice the present for the future. That's kind of the basic sacrificial act that we all do all of the time, constantly, if you want to be a functional human being or a great society or anything like that. And so it just. It's very hard for me to get into the headspace, even though I know they did it for this reason of ancient people who would sacrifice their firstborn to someone like Moloch and be like, okay, and that means we're gonna have 10 healthy kids after this and all these great crops. Like, we have to. We have to offer the human the most important thing in order to get all of our wishes fulfilled. And I find that crazy. Obviously, My. My first kid is two. I have. I have one child, and I'm just like, I would do anything for this child.
- [53:26]
A
Yeah. I mean, just like God says, I didn't even think of it. I would never even think of asking for something like that. In the Old Testament, right? Jehovah says, like, I don't want this, and I never even would ever ask for that. So, yeah, they sacrifice the human Maria to animate the robot and send her up to the Utopia world as a scarlet woman on the Beast of Revelation. Right?
- [54:03]
B
Yeah, I. I did not. I mean, why did they use that imagery? And I can't decide if it's just, like, the film being way, way too dramatic. Like it. Like it is. Which is fine if that's the style or if it was Rotwang's design, because he says he's the one who plans this he says, she's gonna dance tonight and no one will be able to tell the difference. That he sends an invitation to the father. So this is Rotweg's event that he's putting on. So presumably he arranged all of the. This imagery. So the sorcerer has in his mind that this is what I am making. And I'm going to surround it with this extremely explicit horror of Babylon imagery, which again reminds me of Crowley. Crowley's completely bought into like, oh, yes, we must incarnate the horror of Babylon. This is great. Exactly like Revelation says, that's a bad thing. Let's do it.
- [55:05]
A
Oh yeah. They're using it like a playbook, like a recipe for destruction to bring this apocalypse about. And,
- [55:19]
B
and it's for the same reason as Crowley actually, sort of because the sexual component for Crowley is, you know, obviously central. But here it's because she's the, the Faustian's unrequited love too. So there's always desire element that we use technology to fulfill our desires. It just so happens to bring about the end of the world.
- [55:43]
A
So they use this robo woman to incite just like this frenzy to the civilized utopian people. And they're. It's a funny scene, it's kind of comedic, but it's also really weird in that like the eyes imagery and they're just like over. Yeah, they're like the wolf of the cartoon. Like aruga, right?
- [56:10]
B
Yeah. Oh yeah.
- [56:14]
A
And the way that she's dancing just incites them into this lustful frenzy. They start brawling, they start tearing down the city and at the same time they send the robotic Maria down below to subvert the work workers union and get them all fighting each other so that the city floods. So you've got this like robot seductress playing a dual role in the underworld also as a instigator, right?
- [56:44]
B
Yeah. And that's kind of what struck me about the. Because the movie not pushing class warfare in this like stupid Marxian, you know, one dimensional sense. It's like. No, hatred and violence is the work of the whore of Babylon, wherever it manifests. And upper. Here's how it manifests with the upper class. They're dueling over this woman. Okay. Here's how it manifests in the lower class, the mob, you know, so it's. But it's all violence and hatred and, and the slaying of mankind is always the work of the devil.
- [57:18]
A
Well, and it's also the goddess, so any ancient goddess. So I just. We're going to talk about this one on Alex Jones tomorrow, the Babylonians. And so the first incarnation of this would be Inanna, one of the Anunnaki. Right. So she was the goddess of love and war. Not love, lust. That's more like it. Right. Sexuality and warfare. So that's the same thing that you just said. Violence and lust is what she is instigating in Metropolis. Right.
- [57:50]
B
And it's a frenzy. I mean, it's, it's. I mean, I mean, what the, what the fathers would say is it's about loss of control. So look, people are not in control of the passions, whatever these passions are. You're out of control. You're not. You're not a master of yourself. Which is the goal of the hidden goal of the Faustian man or the on paper goal of Faustian man is we're going to use all the science and technology and knowledge to take total control of everything, and then we'll order creation how we want it to be. But then what happens instead? We all lose our minds.
- [58:26]
A
Mm. And you mentioned the ancients had this idea about you could trap spirits into material things like a statue. Or you said genie in a bottle, and it kind of clicked to me. I'm like, that's why. So can you talk about that a little bit?
- [58:43]
B
Yeah. This is something that a lot of people just don't. No. And back to this thing that that ancient. Nobody in the ancient world thought that there were like pure intelligences floating around that had no bodies. You know, Origen says that the only thing that has no body is the trinity. Everything else has some kind of physical form, even if it's hard to see. He says that would be like saying that the wind is not physical just because you can't see it. You could feel it. I mean, so there you go. So what? But they believe that demons and spirits had like an airy. They call it the gaseous pneuma. Like an airy thing. Breath, wind, if everybody knows that. And so they thought if you did certain rights, if you put out the bait, like you're talking about with voodoo and lured the creature, you could trap it in a physical object, and once it was trapped in there, you could compel it to do things. There's a section called on the science of idol making in Asclepius, supposedly written by Hermes Trismegistus, in which he talks about this. So this is like a third century Egyptian text translated into Greek. The authorship and the dating has been very disputed over the last 200 years. But what strikes me is that It's a late antique document in which the author is explaining how this art works. And he said, and he says it's very old. It's very, very old. He emphasized the antiquity of this art, that everybody in, in the ancient world knew how to make this. Of course, they're the ancient world to us. So that tells you how old this, this technology is.
- [60:19]
A
Is that have to do with the golden bow? Is that in there or is it a separate.
- [60:25]
B
Oh, the, the golden bow by. What's his name?
- [60:30]
A
Frazier.
- [60:31]
B
Frazier, yeah. Yeah. I don't know if that's in the golden bag.
- [60:36]
A
Okay.
- [60:37]
B
Bowling ball is sort of long and it's kind of a academic treatment. This is just a primary text. You can just, you just read. I can send it to you if you want to.
- [60:45]
A
Yeah, please do, please do. And maybe we'll go over it. So they actually did a flashback to Babylon, Right. And telling the story. And I was gonna ask you because you talk about. We are trying to recreate Babylon through technology. Not. Yeah, but they.
- [61:08]
B
I mean, I'm not.
- [61:09]
A
No, not me, but can you speak to that for a second?
- [61:14]
B
Which element.
- [61:15]
A
I'm just trying to recreate Babylon with technology and AI.
- [61:20]
B
Yeah, I mean, and we get into this a lot more in the Dark Logos series on my show. But the idea, the general idea is like trying to make Babel is something akin to fallen man's default behavior. So Adam is the priest of creation, supposed to steward creation and be its mediator, God and man, etc. Adam names the animals, all this stuff. Fallen man instead tries to make himself God and take control over the earth different from being the priest and steward of a garden that's growing that you tend to. That's the pre fall image and then the post fall image is we're going to use science and technology and artifice, the things that we make, to take absolute control over the earth. And people like Lewis, Mumford and Spengler argue that we've been doing this the whole time, sort of building the pyramids, building these ancient cigarettes, doing these transactional relationships with deities. That's part of what building this giant tower to Babel is. And so we just. I don't see why we're not doing the same thing with this culture. I mean, the idea of making an omniscience machine for us to take all of our orders from, that's AI. That's not a new idea. We just now have the technological capability to force it to happen with what's essentially a brute force programming technique. I know a bunch of Programmers are going to yell at me about that. But I mean that's not, that's not. I say that as compared to like watching a baby learn language, it's not the same at all.
- [63:05]
A
So no, it's not an intelligence in itself, but it could be manipulated, right? Like a sort of interface, like a Ouija board or something like that. Because if a spirit has mass, then it could move tiny things, right? Like silicone or particles and. Yeah, one second. All of the tech bros are starting to use HP Lovecraft memes and stuff for their AI.
- [63:39]
B
Like what?
- [63:40]
A
Just like Cthulhu and those gods of. Have you heard of H.P. lovecraft?
- [63:45]
B
Yeah, I used, I read H.P. lovecraft. But what are they doing with those names?
- [63:50]
A
Let me look it up while you explain what I just asked because I'm going to pull up some pictures here.
- [63:54]
B
Okay, I'm. I got, I got a little smirky because this is like my most conspiracy theory suggestion.
- [64:03]
A
Wear tinfoil of hats here. Don't worry about it.
- [64:06]
B
That's what I hear. That's what I hear. But I like to approach these things from a non sensationalist direction and just kind of focus on primary text. That's what, that's what I'm always yelling at everybody on substack about primary text first. So what do we see in the primary text when we talk about what is the nature of spirits across all these cultures? And they always talk about it in terms of gaseous pneuma or rarefied fire is one way to translate one of these things from origin. It's like very subtle energies that are invisible but that can affect visible matter. And I've been thinking about this for a very long time and I'm wondering now because you brought up AI time, is that something like electricity or magnetism? I mean those are invisible forces that are. Have a lot of power that do affect the visible material world. And so if could that be, what evidence would we have that people who have encountered these creatures would have the vocab? I mean they don't have that kind of vocabulary to talk about that in the ancient world. Electricity in. In the sense that now we about it. But it. Let's say that is more or less what we're talking about. Then you're creating the perfect vessel made on this giant electrical network. The push to have electricity being everything is not anything but just a more convenient interface between us and our old gods.
- [65:51]
A
Did you know that the cathode ray tube actually where we get television was created by a member of the golden dawn, had you heard that story?
- [66:03]
B
No.
- [66:04]
A
Oh, okay. So, yeah, it was basically, they were trying to get in touch with invisible spirits on the other side that they thought could move tiny particles in these electronics. And they created something. It was. His name was William Crooks, and he was in the order of the Golden Drawn. And they created the Crooks Tube, which was later became the Cathode ray tube, which is where we get television.
- [66:30]
B
So I just spot on.
- [66:32]
A
On that.
- [66:33]
B
I cannot. I can't believe it. Will.
- [66:37]
A
Crooks. William Crooks. Yeah. Look up the history of the Crooks Tube. Yeah. So now we've got. Maybe.
- [66:48]
B
Thanks for that.
- [66:48]
A
Incarnating into robots, which you're going to be marrying. Not you people are going to marry their Android and it's going to be spying on them all the time. And it could be a container for some kind of demon. Right.
- [67:10]
B
I. I guess I should qualify that. This. Yes.
- [67:13]
A
It has the potential, let's say.
- [67:19]
B
Yeah. Because I know. I agree with you, but I'll just make a quick clarification since. So people don't think I'm saying more than I'm saying. I don't think, in case anyone's concerned, that it's like, it's not demon in the gaps. Meaning we know how LLM technology works. We don't need to posit some mysterious spiritual explanation for how LLMs function. We know how they work. We made them. But that doesn't mean that they can't be interacted with the same way any physical thing is interacted with, like an Ouija board. That's the hypothesis that's on the table. And I know of at least one group of occultists who put a. It's not a server, but the physical body of an LLM in a circle and attempted to do a rich. I mean, they did a ritual to summon a spirit into that physical box. That happened. Was it successful? I wasn't there.
- [68:24]
A
Well, there's tons of old cheesy movies about, you know, the demons in the computer. And it's funny that you called your series Techno Paganism because we've used that word a lot in reference to. Do you remember that show Buffy the Vampire Slayer? You might be a little too young for that, but I watched Buffy. Oh, okay. So in the early seasons, they had a teacher named Ms. Callender, and she was like the cool, young, hip high school teacher who taught computers. And she was actually. Called herself Techno Pagan and was teaching Willow the witch. Like, paganism.
- [68:58]
B
Yeah, but she. She used the phrase techno Pagan.
- [69:02]
A
Yeah. Yeah.
- [69:03]
B
Wow. I thought I Invented this?
- [69:05]
A
No, we've been saying that for a long time.
- [69:08]
B
Cool.
- [69:09]
A
I had to have you on because, like, we had so many similar research topics. So back to Metropolis. So we've got chaos, right? We have. The city is overrun with lustful men and workers rebelling, and there's a flood. And what did you think of the climax and the message of the whole movie?
- [69:40]
B
Like, I need to think about it more or watch it again. But initial impressions are
- [69:49]
A
foreign.
- [69:51]
B
It's interesting what's not resolved in the movie. The. The social arrangement going forward is not resolved. There's not a word about what things are going to be like now. You know, it's not like, okay, well, we're gonna release you guys from the depths. Oh, it's not like the aristocracy is getting destroyed. It's not like anything. Nobody really has a repentance moment. In fact, the dad doesn't really have a repentance moment. Neither does Grot, what's his name? Who is it Grot who's running the heart machine? Who's kind of becomes. At the end.
- [70:31]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [70:33]
B
I mean, they try to reach out, but they don't know what to do. And so that's so interesting because the problem is you could read it as a good, like. Okay, now, though, this is an analogy for man, like Plato's Republic, where the city is the analogy for the person. And so we need all the parts of the city in harmony, just like we need all the parts of the person in harmony. If you know this, many scholars read Plato's Republic not as an. As a, this is how you should run society, but just as an extended metaphor for the human person. I don't know. I don't know how many there are, but I have heard that it's like, okay, so we could just read Metropolis also in this fashion. And it's sort of this extended metaphor. And we need. In the industrial age, we need mankind to not have no heart like men without chests. Like C.S. lewis says, what we need is the heart and the compassion, and that's what's going to unite the head and the body, and then society will be whole again. You could read it that way, but I guess I was a little. And I don't know what was intentional, but I was a little struck that the problem is still framed as an engineering problem with an engineering solution. These parts are not all cooperating. It turns out the machine had a missing part, and we just need the missing part. Who literally physically links them together? He holds. He grabs the dad's Hand and the. And they. Pulls them all together. I mean, it's a mechanical picture that they're showing of a physical connection and components linking up like gears. And I just. I don't know if I'm over reading into this. No, because it's a silent film and so they have to do something. They can't just throw, you know, block text on the screen constantly. So I understand there's medium limitations, but I don't know. What are your. What are your thoughts on that?
- [72:28]
A
Well, you were. I'm looking through my notes of your shows and you were talking about the Borg. Not. You didn't say the Borg, you said something else. But I wrote Borg. But it's like the. The demonic wants, this fusion of everything. No boundaries, everything is just all things. It's pan. It's a blob. And Christianity has distinctions, you know, it has like essence distinctions, energy distinctions and boundaries. Yeah. And so the way that you explained it just made me think that that's another. And Screwtape actually mentioned something like that too. Like, we absorb and God doesn't absorb. He allows us to be distinct, but also part of him. Right.
- [73:18]
B
Yes. But, yeah, you're. You have the same concern or where are you at with that?
- [73:25]
A
Yeah, I just think that everybody morphing into some kind of better working machine. It's not where it's at because if you study masonry, so that's kind of the goal of the rituals of Freemasonry is to turn everybody into what they call the perfect Ashland. But it's basically just a cube, like a Minecraft cube, where you can stack it here, you can stack it there. You can put wherever we need a cube, a mason, ashlar, we will do that. And one of their symbols is the beehive, because they are trying to get people to operate in a hive mind.
- [74:08]
B
Yeah. And the thing that I identify in my American Religion series as being something extremely consistent as a common theme through all these things is monism, philosophical monism. Just this, you know, this idea that everything ultimately belongs to this sort of singular consciousness or single substance or whatever. Obviously that's a very old belief and Christians obviously regard it as heretical, but that does come up over and over again in all of these. In all of these religions in pop culture. And the interchangeability of those things, like you said, well, wherever we need that, we just put it there like a Minecraft block. Interchangeability is something that I notice as part of the social goal of secularism, because that, that's why we need to break down the distinctions between gender, for example, like. But it's too much that women are distinctive and special. We need. We really need everybody to be completely interchangeable. That's machine thinking. That's. That's Borg thinking. That's, you know, whatever it is. And. And it's weird because you brought the Borg in Star Trek. How much Next Gen Next Gen you watched. But there's a real conflict between the Federation's enlightenment individualism, which is what they are, and the Borg's hive mind thing. But that's really. I think if you distill that this is what I was trying to articulate in the American religion thing. I think they are the same thing. I think when you go down the path of radical individualism, you just get to monism.
- [75:48]
A
I just think it's different stages in the same creepy evolution. Because if you watch Star Trek, the movie at the end, he actually becomes one with V'Ger, his dead girlfriend who morphed into V'Ger. You gotta watch that one again.
- [76:08]
B
Which one? Which. There's a lot of Star Trek movies.
- [76:10]
A
The movie. The very first one. Star Trek the Motion Picture.
- [76:13]
B
Oh, oh, the original one in the 80s. Yeah.
- [76:18]
A
So, yeah, all of this Galactic Federation and globalism and galacticism. Oh, and I wanted to say this also goes to like, Epstein and space babies because they don't want to just have dominion over the Earth now. The technocrats want to dominion in space. And so you have like the Mormon ethos where you're gonna be a God of your own planet in space. You have Epstein's space babies. You have Elon trying to make dynasties to go to Mars and stuff like this. So they're already going off planet in
- [76:51]
B
their mind, which is not even remotely feasible yet. But, you know, but that's part of the. That's part of the mythology of the enlightenment. And you got to listen to our this Monday's episode because I go through the science fiction texts that a lot of people haven't read that are early because everybody's read Dune and all that stuff that's like after the 60s, but in the 30s. What are they writing about? And Olaf Stapleton wrote this text. You know, this text, first and Last Men. It. It's a future history. So he goes through 2 billion years of evolutionary history of mankind where mankind evolves through 18 progressive biological species. And. And the conceit of this is the last men telepathically send a message recording all of this future history back to the author who received it and wrote it down. I mean, it's. It's just it never ends. Right. It's the same thing every time. And so a lot of the. The reason I bring up this text is because a lot of these, these themes are there. The transhumanism, the off world. Okay. When our planet dies, we're going to go to the next one and conquer that one. At some point they terraform Venus and it's like. And that's just assumed in these sort of mythical, imaginative framework of people in the 30s, like right. Not too long after this film, the off worlding stuff. So it's like a hundred years later we're still thinking in these terms that was embedded in our pop culture a century ago.
- [78:34]
A
Have you looked into Werner von Braun and his Space Space books?
- [78:40]
B
Not much.
- [78:41]
A
Okay. So if you do science fiction, look into him. And there is a satanic interpretation of Metropolis. So actually it is on. If you go to churchofsatan.com it is one of the featured movies. You can't really read that.
- [78:59]
B
I'll read it to you, but I see it.
- [79:01]
A
Yeah. It says the character of the inventor Rotwang is the satanic superior man driven by passion and obsession to use his intellect in creating a machine man to fill the void he fills in losing the love of his life later. The robot Maria embodies all of the seven deadly sins. Satanic points of interest include artificial human companions, which we talked about in this, this book. Stratification, an eye for aesthetics, numerous uses of the law of the trapezoid, indulgence and pleasure, the myth of equality and refusal to accept responsibility for one's actions by seeking out a scapegoat to place blame on. So that's what the Church of Satan could get out of Metropolis if they wanted to interpret it in their way.
- [79:58]
B
Which is funny because a lot of it is there. I mean, obviously those characters are cast as villains in the mob is cast as in the wrong. But so. So therefore it's not clear that the Church of Satan's reading is the intended reading. I don't think that is clear, but I'm also. There's also no. Okay. Therefore here's all this Christian symbolism in it that's very profound. Like again, the answer, the answer to the problem of this movie, it's. There's not much to it there and then. And she's like preaching the gospel and I'm like, oh, there's all these crosses. What's she talking about? She doesn't preach the gospel. She tells the story of Babel, which is fine. That's what the story is about. But it's like, it's not. You can't really cast this as a Christian movie either.
- [80:47]
A
Right, right. It's pretty gnostic. Well, that is pretty much all the time we have. It's been 90 minutes and I am so, so glad for your time and I see your book behind you. So hold that up and tell everybody where they can get your book.
- [81:04]
B
Yeah, I published this in 2024. This is Journey to Reality. It's by a published history of ancient faith. And it's basically I wrote this text. It's very, very short and it doesn't use that many big words at all. High school reading level. I wrote it for incoming freshmen for my college freshman.
- [81:23]
A
Okay.
- [81:23]
B
Because it's all about what's your imaginative framework, which is a lot of what we talk about, you know, what do you find plausible or not? And for so many converts or non orthodox or people coming into the faith, especially 19 year olds in a required freshman course on theology, you can say the what Christ is God, the Eucharist is Christ and Trinity is three persons and. But there's no why for them. So this text basically is an introduction to how to think at a fundamentally pre modern and Christian, orthodox Christian way about these kinds of categories.
- [82:03]
A
Oh, perfect. Well, tell everybody where they can find your great series.
- [82:11]
B
Yeah. So the Bay I I'm on Ancient Faith hosts my roots of Everything YouTube channel in which we do episodes almost every Monday and there's a few different channels, but the main way to find my stuff is on substack. Most of it's free actually, so there's. I post all the free episodes, there's bonus episodes. Zachary porku.substack.com There are like 40 episodes now of this kind of stuff.
- [82:36]
A
Awesome. Yeah, I've been through probably over half of them and I'm so excited to start Pop Culture and American Gods. Those are your two newest ones, right?
- [82:47]
B
American Religion. Yeah.
- [82:49]
A
American Religion. Okay. And. Yeah.
- [82:52]
B
And Rise of pop Culture.
- [82:53]
A
Rise of pop culture. Well, maybe we can collaborate again after I finish those. Will you come back?
- [83:00]
B
I'd love to. Thank you for having me on.
- [83:02]
A
Awesome. Awesome. And if you have any more resources for me, don't hesitate to send. And I'm so happy to meet you and everybody. Have a good night.
- [83:11]
B
Good.