Thursday, July 23, 2009

Walking on the Moon

We are either born aloft on pinions of whimsy or being scooted along in the palm of an unseen hand.

A few days ago (22 July) we continued our explorations of what some call synchromysticism--and what are beginning to think of as poetic resonance--by Googling the words "Weinman / Carradine"--following some recent posts--with interesting results.

The first link which comes up leads us to a 1999 film directed by Richard Weinman and Keith Carradine called The Hunter's Moon. This would mean little if not for the fact that there were some important moon-related things going on at the moment

The first is of course that it came smack dab in the middle of the ballyhoo surrounding the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon shot. Men first walked on the moon on July 20th, 1969--one day before the Summer Solstice--and returned home four days later.

The second is that on the 22nd the moon eclipsed the sun and turned day into night across much of Asia, widely seen as a bad omen.

Also curious is that LoS superstar Tyler Weinman hunted his feline prey by night.

A Hunter's Moon, also known as a Blood Moon, is the first full moon after the harvest moon, the moon closest to the autumn equinox. The name comes from the fact that it's an ideal time for hunters to track and kill their prey at night. Interestingly, the name was used by both Europeans and Native Americans, and it was a feast day among some tribes of North America and Western Europe--before Columbus.

And what of Carradine? One of brother Keith's co-stars in that film was "Wild" Bill Mock. Mock...Bill? Kill Bill? Wild Bill? Hunter's Moon indeed.

What is the film all about anyway? According to Wikipedia "In this Depression-era drama, Carradine plays Turner, a WWI vet who is haunted not only by memories of the war but by the civil and economic unrest of the time."

War and economic unrest? Do tell!

Burt Reynolds plays a tyrant who dominates the residents of the mountain upon which he resides, and who sets out to kill young Turner to prevent him from romancing his daughter.

One can't but help think of Hassan-ibn-Sabbah, legendary Old Man of the Mountain and founder of the 11th century Ismaeli sect sometimes referred to as the Assassins. He was said to be in league with the Knights Templar, in turn believed by many to be the ancestors of the Freemasons.

(The) Hunter's Moon is among other things the name of two TV episodes and a video game featuring 32 star systems:

"Each level takes place in a void with two dimensional cities appearing as they are being built by "worker cells". The worker cells are indestructible but the bricks dropped by them can be temporarily destroyed using the ship's weapon. The goal of the game is to collect enough star cells contained inside the cities to get to the next level."

One of the TV episodes is also called Mystery in Space. Following episodes include Question Authority and Panic in the Sky.

The other TV show is a 3-parter involving a plot to extirminate humanity.

It is also the name of at least three novels. In one of these, a 2005 novel by O.R. Melling, two cousins search for a magic door to a land where humans are ruled by the little people.

Again, quoting Wikipedia: "Gwen must match her wits against those of a mischievous, immortal race, in an effort to save herself and her cousin from the land of Faerie and the Hunter's Moon."

So as we wave flags and pat ourselves on the back over the famous moonwalk by Neil Armstrong and crew, whose great phallic rocket finally conquered the Goddess, we can think of that other famous moonwalker, the plastic androgyne Michael Jackson, dead Sun King. And another famous Armstrong, the phallic Lance, chases the sun-yellow jersey in the Tour de France. He's already won it 7 times.
And fellow moonwalker Buzz Aldrin flew a Masonic flag on the Moon.

To quote: Tranquility Lodge 2000, Texas AF&AM:

"On July 20, 1969, two American Astronauts landed on the moon of the planet Earth, in an area known as Mare Tranquilitatis , or "Sea of Tranquility". One of those brave men was Brother Edwin Eugene (Buzz) Aldrin, Jr., a member of Clear Lake Lodge No. 1417, AF&AM, Seabrook, Texas. Brother Aldrin carried with him SPECIAL DEPUTATION of then Grand Master J. Guy Smith, constituting and appointing Brother Aldrin as Special Deputy of the Grand Master, granting unto him full power in the premises to represent the Grand Master as such and authorize him to claim Masonic Territorial Jurisdiction for The Most Worshipful Grand Lodge of Texas, Ancient Free and Accepted Masons, on The Moon, and directed that he make due return of his acts. Brother Aldrin certified that the SPECIAL DEPUTATION was carried by him to the Moon on July 20, 1969.

To commemorate this historic event, and to further solidify and establish Texas Freemasonry on the Moon, it is proposed that a charter be issued to a new Lodge, to be known as Tranquility Lodge No. 2000, and that authorization for such new Lodge and its purposes be granted by the addition of Article 201a, to read as follows:" [text follows]

Or maybe it goes deeper than that, as this book asserts:

"Few people are aware that NASA was formed as a national defense agency adjunct empowered to keep information classified and secret from the public at large. Even fewer people are aware of the hard evidence that secret brotherhoods quietly dominate NASA, with policies far more aligned with ancient religious and occult mystery schools than the façade of rational science the government agency has successfully promoted to the world for almost fifty years."

What does it all mean. We don't know. On 18 June NASA launched its' first moon mission in 10 years. According to NASA:

"The Mission Objectives of the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) include confirming the presence or absence of water ice in a permanently shadowed crater at the Moon’s South Pole. The identification of water is very important to the future of human activities on the Moon."

Maybe they're getting anxious to finally have a Lodge meeting up there.

5 comments:

  1. cf "Astrospies" on PBS about the Manned Orbital Laboratory, which has the great acronym MOL -- perfect as it housed spies, but ironic as it gazed down silently from the heavens instead of burrowing in silently from the earth...

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  2. I recommend Tom Wolfe's article, "One Giant Leap to Nowhere" published on the anniversary of the moon walk.

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  3. Very cool links Gid. I'm gonna really peep that PBS series if I can nab it online. The mystical 7 rears it's head again! Love that group photo, too. They never made it into space, though....

    And Wolfe is spot on. We should be living on the Moon and Mars at this point. Too bad we'd rather throw money down the toilet in the Middle East.

    Ahh the wonders of the petroleum-based economy!

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  4. You realize, of course, that the current race to the moon is all about nabbing dibs on Helium 3?

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  5. Ahh yes, that makes sense. The LCROSS water thing is only to see how feasible it will be to set up mining facilities and not have to rocket water to the moon every week or so.

    From the article:

    "The primary objective of Indian Space Research Organization's first lunar probe called Chandrayaan-I, launched on October 22, 2008, was reported in some sources to be mapping the Moon's surface for helium-3-containing minerals.[39] However, this is debatable; no such objective is mentioned in the project's official list of goals, while at the same time, many of its scientific payloads have noted helium-3-related applications.[40][41]

    Cosmochemist and geochemist Ouyang Ziyuan from the Chinese Academy of Sciences who is now in charge of the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program has already stated on many occasions that one of the main goals of the program would be the mining of helium-3, from which operation "each year three space shuttle missions could bring enough fuel for all human beings across the world."[42]

    In January 2006, the Russian space company RKK Energiya announced that it considers lunar helium-3 a potential economic resource to be mined by 2020,[43] if funding can be found.[44][45]

    Mining gas giants for helium-3 has also been proposed.[46] The British Interplanetary Society's hypothetical Project Daedalus interstellar probe design was fueled by helium-3 mines in the atmosphere of Jupiter, for example[citation needed]. Jupiter's high gravity makes this a less energetically favorable operation than extracting helium-3 from the other gas giants of the solar system, however."

    On a side note, I read the MJ "owned" significant parcels of lunar real estate....

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