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Monday, October 29, 2018

Hallowe'en Countdown 2018: The CERN Tarot Deck and The Cybernetic Seance


The Knight of Swords in the CERN tarot deck connects early computers and the founding of IBM (originally established in Poland) to the Holocaust. Image Source: Hexen 2.0. Click to enlarge all images.

Even if you only follow the mainstream, you don't have to go very far before you come across horrors which are worse than anything found in the ancient stories. Not even Salome could ask for what passes for statecraft these days.

There are misattributed photos now circulating online of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who disappeared into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on 2 October 2018 and came out in chopped-up pieces. The photos, posted on disreputable sites, include a skinned head, with the face spread on the floor in front of the meaty skull. Warning: the linked material is gory and linking does not imply my endorsement of values expressed in linked material.

These scenes immediately reminded me of Clive Barker's Hellraiser; Barker's horror fiction describes demons walking the earth and entering it by way of certain portals. His  famous Books of Blood from the mid-1980s opened as follows:
"The dead have highways.

They run, unerring lines of ghost-trains, of dream-carriages, across the wasteland behind our lives, bearing an endless traffic of departed souls. Their thrum and throb can be heard in the broken places in the world, through cracks made by acts of cruelty, violence and depravity. Their freight, the wandering dead, can be glimpsed when the heart is close to bursting, and sights that should be hidden come plainly into view.

They have sign-posts, these highways, and bridges and lay-bys. They have turnpikes and intersections.

It is at these intersections, where the crowds of dead mingle and cross, that this forbidden highway is most likely to spill through into our world. The traffic is heavy at the cross-roads, and the voices of the dead are at their most shrill. Here the barriers that separate one reality from the next are worn thin with the passage of innumerable feet." ("The Book of Blood" in Clive Barker's Books of Blood, vol. 1 (London: Sphere Books, 1985), p. 1.)
It is almost as though the Khashoggi case created one of those broken places in the world, a rent in the fabric of reality between the worlds of the living and the dead, created by an act of cruelty. France 24 denied the authenticity of the Khashoggi photos; its reporters found that the photos hailed from Mexico and Egypt in 2017:
"The two photos that show the arms and the legs date back to August 2017, and were taken in Giza, Egypt. These body parts belonged to a man described as 'elderly' in the Egyptian press, who report that his body parts were found scattered between two different parts of town.

The photo showing the skull, the scalped face, the pair of eyes and the penis had already been published online back in July 2017. According to a blog specialised in Mexican drug trafficking-related crime, these body parts belonged to a police commander in Tecoman, Mexico, who was killed by a cartel."
Nevertheless, the photos are real, even if they are not part of the Khashoggi story, and the latter is bad enough without misattributed photo evidence. All of it confirms that something has gone wrong behind the façade of normal authority and current affairs.










More clues of the state of affairs come from CERN, the autonomous quantum physics research organization. It turns out that CERN has an artist's residency. This year, the artist in residence, Suzanne Treister, created a CERN tarot deck. Out of all the things Treister could have developed to describe CERN's attempt to crack the building blocks of matter, she chose magic (Hat tip: Dark Journalist; see his dedicated video on this tarot deck, here). All tarot images are © S. Treister and found here.

Treister's thematic choices for the deck demonstrate that this occult topic is germane to the understanding of high tech and advanced science. The artist starts with references to the Holocaust. Again, this event involved mass cruelty and death which wore down the integrity of everyday reality and opened it up to something on the other side.



This bloody history overshadows other projects on Treister's Website. She has a sub-site devoted to her alter ego, a character she calls Rosalind Brodsky. This character is the artist's personal time-traveling avatar, who allows Treister to imagine her/not-her potential in the future:
"Rosalind Brodsky, with whom I share Anglo/Eastern European/Jewish roots, was born in London in 1970 and survived until 2058. Her first delusional experience of time travel supposedly occurred during a session with the pyschoanalyst Julia Kristeva in Paris, at the moment she noticed Kristeva's similarity to the face in the photograph of her Polish-Jewish grandmother who had been murdered in the Holocaust. By 1995 Brodsky is a delusional time traveller who believes herself to be working in London at the Institute of Militronics and Advanced Time Interventionality (IMATI) in the 21st century. IMATI is a controversial government funded organisation which develops equipment and carries out time travel research projects whose results are for use primarily by the military and other government research organisations."
The adventures of this alter ego formed the basis of an early Web project, on which Treister laboured from 1995-2006. Along with twinning herself, Treister is fascinated by reversed images and language, another occult concept, for one moves through the looking glass to other realms of knowledge. In Treister's work, as with our own lives, the surreal perceptions of change are blurring with actual, surreal change. As we float unmoored between real-fake-real horror and real horror we should ask whose idea it was that we ought to 'awake' into this realm of "high luminosity."



Treister's CERN tarot offers some answers to these questions. This year on September 10, the Large Hadron Collider celebrated its tenth anniversary. Although CERN was founded in 1954, it has over the past decade emerged as a kind of Millennial Vatican, where worship has turned to particle smashing - and other things.

In 2016, CERN officially had a budget of CHF 1.127 billion (or just under 1 billion euros). However, a 2018 source stated that there are 4.3 billion euros allocated just to the Large Hadron Collider for "procurement at the forefront of technology." That's what big magnets and "unconventional contracting" cost. Moneywise, one gets the sense that we are not getting a comprehensive view and in general, the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing.

Energy, subatomic physics, geopolitics, virtual reality: they are all there, clustered around this one giant experiment, which is now classed as a separate legal jurisdiction, a Millennial city state. CERN is entitled to jurisdictional immunity. That is, the lab complex and its grounds are immune from the legal process; they operate outside the normal laws of Switzerland and France.

In an earlier post, I have already discussed the related Gottard Tunnel opening ceremony, which unmistakably paraded occult symbolism as well as the 'prank' simulated human sacrifice at CERN in 2016.

Tarot of the Technocracy


In Treister's CERN tarot, the artist hints at the larger context to the scientific developments of our era. The deck slips from the latest tech concerns - surveillance, drones, the cloud - to their arcane origins. The artist highlights certain figures who developed the foundations for the current technocracy. They were not physicists.

There are some terrifying ideas here, which are difficult to decipher for those not schooled in reading the underlying messages. CERN's new interest in fostering artists seems to involve the way we dream things into reality. That is, a so-called "holographic reality" is a projection from our consciousness out into the physical world, and that process can be controlled, thus gaining the means to change history. If that protocol sounds insane, it's because it is.




Figures highlighted here range from William Blake to mathematician Ada Lovelace. The deck gradually introduces the notion that high technology derives from pagan nature worship! For example, the deck asserts that the conceptual forerunner of the World Wide Web was the Whole Earth Catalog (1968-1998), a back-to-the-land publication which reached its heyday in the 1970s.





The Cybernetic Séance


The Cybernetic Séance, a meeting of scientists, social scientists and philosophers in New York City in 1947. Treister implies that these individuals were the founders of a world view, not overtly acknowledged, but dominant in our world today. Click to enlarge to read the names of attendees. Image Source: Hexen 2.0. I have not confirmed the photography's authenticity. I think it looks staged.

Treister's tarot overlaps with an earlier video work on Macy conference attendees, whose 1947 meeting depicted in the image above and in the artist's video below was called The Cybernetic Séance. Was this a real meeting or Treister's artistic fiction, like her time-traveling alter ego? Treister maintains that the Macy conferences of 1942 and 1946-1953 established the basic principles connecting human, animal and machine, under which we now labour:
"Macy conferences attendees developed and disseminated the idea of cybernetics - the science of control and communication in the animal and the machine, in society and in individual human beings - as a model of understanding and controlling the world.

Macy Conferences attendees consisted of mathematicians, scientists, engineers and leading figures of post-war social science, some of whom had contributed to the construction and use of nuclear weapons, some of whom went on to carry out CIA funded military research into the psychological effects of LSD and its potential as a tool for interrogation and psychological manipulation in such projects as the CIA's MKULTRA program and others who took ethical positions and subsequently rejected military funding of their work."
There is one warning that these would-be global engineers needed and need now to consider. No matter how much we try to control nature with political and scientific theories, nature always throws a monkey wrench into the mix, an element of unwanted surprise. So it will be with this combination of science, art and magic.

HEXEN 2.0 Cybernetic Séance from S T on Vimeo.



Image Source: pinterest.


See all my posts on the Occult, Horror, and Ghosts.
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