The End of the Iron Age and the Galactic Alignment of 2012

© 2004, 2008 Jonathan Zap

Edited by Austin Iredale

The Equinox party at the Circle A Ranch—a communal living situation created by young anarchists at the outskirts of Boulder, Colorado—was a magical nexus for me, one of those zones of heightened synchronicity where many threads of the great tapestry wove together into a pattern recognizable, even revelatory.

With a luck that felt almost uncanny, the unpredictable lottery of high desert weather had produced a glorious winner. The first day of spring turned out to be a preview of summer, and the unexpected warmth of the evening felt almost like an enchantment, an invitation into mystery.

The Circle A Ranch has an improbable location, surrounded by many acres of open fields, at the distant circumference of which were the twinkling lights of suburban houses and strip malls. It seemed to be placed at the center of this open space as if it was enclosed by an invisible dome, creating an oasis of green within a suburban landscape. There was an enormous fire pit, a crater in the ground that looked like the result of a small asteroid impact; people were drumming and dancing around a blazing fire. Next to the fire pit was a barn that was being used as the screen for surreal video projections. The barn looked like a dream cottage, intricately tie-died in a vat of electrical colors.

Inside the main house, I set up to do free I Ching readings and dream interpretation. One interesting person after another showed up, providing many fascinating moments. One of a pair of identical twins told me a dream reflecting the strange dynamics unique to twin psychology. Then an eighteen-year-old male, we’ll call him Jeremy, showed up. I knew him slightly since we were both regulars at the same coffee shop, Cafe Solé, located in South Boulder.

Jeremy is a philosophy student with a brilliant mind for complex ideas. We discussed a number of interesting themes, many of which, I later realized, were directly related to a vortex of meaning and discovery that had already begun to pull me into its centrifugal spiral. After establishing some common ground in ideas, Jeremy related a recurrent dream that had haunted his childhood.

In the dream, he would always find himself at the bottom of a red pit, as a gigantic steamroller—a leviathan, as he described it—would be rolling toward him.

The dream, which could be contained in a single sentence, had a deceptive simplicity. The simplicity concealed a great density of meaning, which would continue to expand in my mind during the next twenty-four hours. At first, however, I saw the dream as archetypal and straight forward. A recurrent childhood dream will often, in my experience, map out the core situation of the dreamer’s incarnation.

The dream dramatically portrayed the self versus the collective. The self finds itself in a fallen world, a pit, and the collective, far more massive than the individual, is antagonistic to individual consciousness. It especially seeks to flatten what I call “mutants.” A mutant, as I use the term, is a mutagenic individual who lives outside of approved collective parameters and is in a state of heightened metamorphosis. You are more likely to find them among the young because the pressures of the collective steamroller have yet to press with enough force and time to flatten the young into the flattened outline of a person we call a normal adult. Particularly strong, young mutants can continue to grow and metamorphose into adulthood. Jeremy was clearly a mutant: his eyes had that iridescent afterglow; he emanated a large field of self-awareness and compassion; and there was about him the blue and indigo feeling of higher thinking, and an older, spiritual nature.

Boulder has the highest per capita occurrence of mutants of any place I’ve ever encountered, and the Equinox party was a mutant nexus within Boulder. But even in such a mutant intensive environment, Jeremy stood out as unusual. I thought I had perfectly comprehended the dream as the most familiar of themes—the mutant versus the machine/collective. The steamroller, as I pointed out to Jeremy, is a machine whose exclusive purpose is dimension reduction. The job of the steamroller is to take that which is three-dimensional and make it two-dimensional. And this is what the massive inertia of the collective baseline of consciousness seeks to do to the mutant—to flatten him into dimensional conformity, to make him part of the asphalt of flatland: a smooth surface that the big machinery can roll over with as little friction as possible. What an appropriate dream to encounter at a party put on by young anarchists!

I compared Jeremy’s position in the dream to the young man standing in front of the tank in Tianamen Square. I pointed out a favorite saying in present-day, Totalitarian China: “The nail which stands out, gets pounded down.” I concluded by pointing out to Jeremy that it would be a mistake to perceive himself as a victim in this situation. What was needed was self-compassionate, courageous acceptance of his incarnation into this fallen world. I suggested that he think of this as something he signed on for to develop his awareness—boot camp for the soul.

Feeling I had satisfactorily interpreted this dream, I let Jeremy get back to the party while I got to the next patiently waiting person to work on his dreams. One person after another showed up for dream interpretation or I Ching. Inevitably, I hit walls of exhaustion with this; as an introvert I can only take so much of the intensity of contact with another’s psyche in these consultations before I become burned out and have to get up and walk around to regain my equilibrium. These were also my opportunities to experience the Equinox party, which impressed me with its positive vibe and mutant intensiveness. I’ve been to many Boulder parties, and even the better ones seem to attract a sizeable number of those hungry ghost types you could often see lurking around Penny Lane—a now-dissolved Boulder coffee shop. They are the sort that always have dark circles under their eyes and the sulky feeling of a vampire indulging self-pity because it hasn’t fed in a while. At the Equinox party, there were much less of that type than usual, and more of the brighter, happening type of people. Everyone was so friendly and approachable, and even after nine years of living in Boulder that still amazes me, having grown up in New York City. Even as dawn drew near, the energy was still vibrant.

Around 5am, I noticed that a collection of the most perpetual of Boulder’s hungry ghosts, aging trustafarians, had appeared and seemed to linger at the edges of the party, absorbing energy. This brought on sudden flashes of memory of the Eighties club scene in New York and the intense, surreal vampires I encountered there. The vampires from that scene would eat these languid Boulder vampires for breakfast. The arrival of these trustafarian bloodsuckers was my departure signal, and I retreated to my 18′ RV home, parked in a grassy field outside the Circle A Ranch.

The next day I found that, of all the dreams and interesting encounters of the Equinox, it was Jeremy’s dream that kept replaying in my mind. I labeled the dream, “The Mutant versus the Machine.”

Later that afternoon I found myself inside a different kind of machine, an ancient brown bomber of a Seventies Saab, hurtling down I-25. The Saab had a missing gas cap, and gas fumes blasted in with what passes for air on I-25. I was sitting in the back seat feeling that the Saab might be a literal bomb, and that my life might end in a fireball of gasoline and Swedish car parts.

Jeremy’s mutant versus the machine dream amplified itself in my mind. I imagined I was in the Red Pit. The redness seemed like the redness of the red planet, Mars, but the air smelled industrial—an atmosphere of gasoline and burnt rubber. The pit was a giant crater, perhaps ground zero of a nuclear detonation in the desert. Near the center of the pit was a young mutant boy, pale, perhaps naked; he couldn’t be seen clearly because there was a distortion of visual field around him, shimmering energy, like heat ripples above hot asphalt. I could feel him staring with horror at the mechanical leviathan rolling up to the edge of the crater. It was all steel and tractor-yellow, part steamroller, part bulldozer, and part tank, but titanic in size, able to eclipse the desert sun. The mutant’s energy intensified with horror and fear of this great machine that sought his flatness. A silent scream was forming in him, ready to burst, and the psionic energy shimmering around him suddenly intensified like the flickering of a candle flame becoming the metal- vaporizing jet of an acetylene torch. The form of the mutant boy—large-eyed and pale—appeared blurred and prismatic within the fiercely rippling corona of energy. A scream then erupted; it was not an acoustical scream, it was a scream of will and mutant psionic energy, a scream to shatter dimensions. In a moment the mechanical titan was pulverized into a smoky dust that vaporized before it even hit the ground. Fissures suddenly began forming in the red ground, giant crevasses cracked open, tectonic plates shook in massive collision, and the red planet felt as though it were about to explode into dust . . .

The dream seemed to surround me like a Red Pit, wouldn’t let me out. It came at me insistently like the gasoline vapors and blasts of I-25 air. Seeking to divert my attention, I pulled out my handheld wireless computer gadget and began looking for something to read.

Some months before, my friend John Jenkins, who authors books about the Maya, had sent me a link to something Jay Weidner and Sharon Rose had written entitled “Tolkien and the End of Time.” For reasons of brevity, I will refer to Weidner and Rose collectively as “Jay.” John knew I was working on a new Tolkien study, Casting Precious into the Cracks of Doom, Androgyny, Alchemy, Evolution and the One Ring. Jay writes about alchemy, and a few years ago I had corresponded with him briefly about a fascinating piece he had written about Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, a film I had studied and written about in the late Seventies. I knew that whatever Jay had written was probably full of insights, and even though this was so directly related to what I was writing, I had procrastinated on reading it for months. Now that my life seemed ready to end in an explosion of petroleum vapors, I decided it was time to stop putting it off.

I began to read on the tiny computer screen in the back of the Saab, and instantly I found stunning relevance to the dream that was haunting me. Jay superimposed the end of an age story—exactly what the ring trilogy represents—onto the perennial philosophy and cycle of four ages described by so many ancient mystery traditions. John Jenkins had written about this cycle of ages in his book, Galactic Alignment, and we had talked about it some time ago, but the details had become blurred in my mind. According to the Maya, the Western Alchemists, and the ancient Hindus, there are four great cycles or ages, each of which lasts for about six thousand years. In the first age there is the greatest connection to spiritual light, but that light diminishes by one fourth until we get to the fourth age, our present age, the period we today refer to as history. The Hindus referred to these ages as Yugas, and our present age of darkness is called the Kali Yuga. Each age is symbolically associated with a metal. The Satya Yuga is the Golden Age; the Treta Yuga is the Silver Age; the Dvapara Yuga is the Bronze Age; and the Kali Yuga is the Iron Age. Jay writes: “According to ancient lore the Iron Age is an Age where the world turns to steel, black magic becomes religion and Men lust for control and dominion over both human beings and the very earth itself.”

The galactic alignment that the Maya correctly identified with the approximate zone around 2012 is not the signal of the end of the world, but rather the end of the Iron Age. It represents the end of the cycle of four ages, an end date beyond which the Maya did not care to continue their long count calendar, but which may also mark the beginning of a new Golden Age.

New connections, an emergent pattern in the great tapestry began to coalesce in my mind. The Red Pit, the red planet. Mars is red for the same reason blood is red: iron. A red pit is a pit of iron oxide. And what threatens to flatten the mutant in this iron pit? A titanic machine of iron and steel—steel merely being the modern alloy of iron. This recurrent dream showed Jeremy’s incarnational position and that of all mutants living in this time—facing down the machine in the red pit of the Iron Age, like the young man facing down the tank in Red China. This dream, brought to me in a party of young anarchists, was a harbinger of the end of the Iron Age.

A song then came over the Saab’s radio, an old, old U2 song, from back in the day when that brown bomber of a car was still a gleam in the eye of a Swedish engineer. “All is quiet on New Year’s day . . . Under a blood red sky . . . we can break free . . . we can be one . . . I will begin again . . . the time is right . . . this is the Golden Age . . .” The fragments of U2 I caught through the blasts of I-25 air were stunning synchronicities.

I wondered if maybe the Saab had already combusted into a fireball, my body consumed in a Swedish automotive inferno, and lost in some bardot I was getting messages of a new cycle of time occurring under a blood red sun, and the approach of a Golden Age over a car radio that existed only in my disembodied imagination.

If this was true, there wasn’t much I could do about it, so I kept reading. As I continued to read, I found Jay discussing Tolkien’s hatred of the Machine Age. This I already knew. Once an interviewer made the mistake of asking Tolkien, “What makes you tick?” Tolkien responded dryly, “I don’t tick, because I’m not a machine” In letters written during World War II to his son Christopher, an RAF pilot, he despaired of the need to use “Mordor gadgets to defeat Mordor” and the hopelessness of using “Sauron’s magic to defeat Sauron.” Whatever side won “the war of the machines,” the real winner, Tolkien wrote, would be the machine.

Throughout his life, repeated again and again in his letters, Tolkien described our world as a fallen world. He recognized that this is a time when the more spiritual magic of the elves had given way to the dense, material magic of technology. Tolkien, and his son Michael, had recurrent dreams of Atlantis:

“Of all the mythical or ‘archetypal’ images this is the one most deeply seated in my imagination, and for many years I had a recurrent Atlantis dream: the stupendous and ineluctable wave advancing from the Sea or over the land, sometimes dark, sometimes green and sunlit.”

In the Tolkien mythology, as described in the Simarillion, the Golden Age of Atlantis is related to the Second Age which involves the rise and fall of Numenor. As we pass through Tolkien’s ages there is a darkening, densification and externalization of inner spiritual magic. Jay quotes Tolkien:

“All use of external plans or devices (apparatus) instead of developments of these inherent inner powers or talents – or even the use of these talents with the corrupted motive of dominating; bulldozing the real world, or coercing other wills.”

Bulldozing the world. This seemed another staggering synchronicity, the bulldozer being the symbolic synonym of the steamroller in the dream.

As Jay points out, the symbolic metals of the four ages—gold, silver, bronze, iron—gain in atomic density as they move from gold to iron. The Iron Age is one of dense materialism and lost contact with the spiritual realm—an age when someone will work long, monotonous hours at a job to make payments on a giant SUV.

But, here at the end of the Iron Age, some trends of densification are giving way to the spirit effusing even the black magic of the machine. Synchronistically, this subject came up in the talk with Jeremy that preceded the dream. I pointed out to him that in the last twenty years or so, as the value of America’s industrial output has tripled, its physical weight has halved as we make less pig iron and more pixels, vanishingly small computer chips, and intellectual property in the form of zeros and ones. Even our machines are becoming etherealized.

And as I’ve pointed out in discussions with John Jenkins, as we align with the galactic center we are also aligning with the black hole at its center, a place where matter is irrealized, space and time disappear, and a possible portal into another dimension opens up. This zone of alignment is a window of opportunity to dissolve our identifications, perhaps even to irrealize our bondage to matter.

Jay also pointed out a connection Tolkien makes obvious in his letters: the One Ring and the machine define the same densification and externalizing of magic. The One Ring, made of the most impervious of metals, gets heavier as Frodo brings it closer to Mt. Doom.

As I’ve written in Casting Precious into the Cracks of Doom, Androgyny, Alchemy, Evolution and the One Ring, Mt. Doom has a connection to the black hole; it is a place aligned with at the end of an age, a place to cast down the black magic, a place where it can be irrealized, returned to the Alchemist’s prima materia from which it was forged.

Stephen Deadelus (the James Joyce character) has said, “History is the nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.” The galactic alignment, which we are in right now—don’t wait for 2012!—is the chance for us collectively, but especially for us as individual mutants, to awaken from the long, long nightmare of history.

© 2004 by Jonathan Zap
Editor: Austin Iredale
Revised: 2008

…there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad

(adapted from The Matrix)

I just came across a college paper I wrote in 1975, when I was seventeen years old, entitled, “Shakespearean Philosophy and the Greenworld.” Referring to Shakespeare’s philosophy I wrote,

“Man was originally designed to live in a completely natural state, in the Garden of Eden or the Golden Age. …. An important concept in considering the levels of nature is the wheel of fortune or the cosmic wheel. …. This lower order of nature is an amoral force that moves in cyclical patterns imitating the movements of the stars. The movement of this amoral force produces not only the cycles of seasons and days, but also in human life, the cycles of prosperity and decline that constitute the wheel of fortune. At the very top of the wheel is the perfect order of the Golden Age and at the bottom is a state of nonbeing or nothingness.”

It seemed almost eerie to find that nearly thirty years ago I was already preoccupied with and writing about the feeling that ours is a fallen time, and that a Golden Age, a greener world than this, is a plane of reality that resonates with both past and future. In Return of the King, Tolkien writes, “Hope and memory shall live still in some hidden valley where the grass is green.”

In Shakespeare’s plays, the “Green World” (a term coined by literary critic Northrope Frye) is a place in the woods where cosmopolitan, neurotic characters go (especially in comedies like A Midsummer’s Night Dream and As You Like It), and genders get swapped through cross-dressing, fairies, elves and visions appear, and somehow the city characters get their psyches and relationships sorted out.

We may experience a similar longing for the Green World via our desires to be out in nature, go on a wilderness sojourn, attend a Rainbow gathering, or experience the realm of Middle Earth through a book or movie (among countless other examples).

We also have a part of our intuition that registers a general wrongness about this world. Hamlet says, “This time is out of joint.” And “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” Some of the most memorable spoken lines of our era are from the first Matrix movie, “There is a splinter in your mind you can’t get out.” and “It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.” The Matrix and Tolkien’s mythology share a belief with the ancient Gnostics that the realm we have incarnated in is largely a diabolical deception or intrinsically corrupted plane. Tolkien wrote in his notes, “But nothing, as has been said, utterly avoids the Shadow upon Arda (earth) or is wholly unmarred, so as to proceed unhindered upon its right courses.”

This idea that reality itself is “off” has come to permeate popular culture. A few years ago a movie came out entitled, “Reality Bites.” Ironically this awful movie embodied the shallow narcissism that is a big part of why this
reality bites.

In a letter Tolkien wrote, “…but certainly there was an Eden on this very unhappy earth. We all long for it, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is still soaked with the sense of exile.” When we perceive the darkness of this realm we are not always altogether filled with despair, because we have both past and future memories of another plane of reality. As a character in a fallen world in Stephen King’s Dark Tower series says before falling into an abyss, “Go then, there are other worlds than these.”

A few years ago someone described to me an out of body experience which involved seeing what appeared to be the earth from a disembodied POV out in space. At first they see the earth that we are all familiar with. An eclipse passes and afterwards they see the same planet, but now it is completely green, all signs of human spoilage gone. Two weeks ago in a motel room in Santa Fe, New Mexico, I had an out of body experience and got to experience the Green World for a few seconds. Apparently, Robert Monroe, the pioneer researcher of out of body eperiences has described something similar. Sometimes perceptions that there are other worlds than these comes through a deep perception of wrongness in this reality, a negative implying a positive. I can remember moments growing up in the Bronx and stepping out into hazy, humid air, the sound of jack hammers and sirens, cracked concrete and asphalt, my whole body and being registering that this was a fallen world, a dark possibility amidst an array of parallel alternatives.

Even science now affirms that this is not the only channel offered on the holographic cable television of eleven dimensional superstrings vibrating hyperspatially through the multiverse.

I remember an old New Yorker cartoon that shows an exasperated father fixing a flat tire in the rain while two petulant children stare at him from the car windows. The father is exclaiming, “No, you don’t understand, this is reality, you can’t switch to another channel.” Maybe, maybe not. The father and the kids each have half the perception. We can’t always switch the channel when we want it to, but sometimes we can, and more often the channel switches by itself. In a few hours you will get tired and your incarnation channel will switch to the dreamtime whether you want it to or not, whether you remember or not.

As I discussed in my previous email, “The Mutant versus The Machine and the End of the Iron Age”(should be posted to website soon) there is evidence that suggests that we are living at the cusp of a great cycle shift, and that a great age of darkness, variously called the fallen world, Kali Yuga, Iron Age, History, or Babylon Matrix is about to shift into a new Golden Age. We may or may not live to experience it in our present bodily forms and ego identities, but then again our present bodily forms and ego identities are largely artifacts of the Matrix. I’m willing to trade mine in for an upgrade when the cycle shifts, and whether it is nuclear armageddon, mutant virus, asteroid, climatic apocalypse, or that SUV I didn’t notice bearing down on me when I cross the street, the reset button will get pressed (with or without eschaton as we have the guaranteed escape hatch called death—-the attribute that, in the Tolkien mythology, made man more blessed than the elves). One way or another the cycle will shift and life will reanimate out of the dark compression of the fallen world.

In Return of the King, Gandalf says to Aragorn as he points out a tree growing out of the snow, “Turn your face from the green world, and look where all seems barren and cold! Yet the life within may then lie sleeping through many long years, and none can foretell the time in which it will awake.”

We may not be able to choose the time of collective rebirth, and intensified darkness will likely precede the dawn, but we can choose whether we are attuned to life channels or death channels. As the Dylan lyric says, “He who’s not busy being born, is busy dying.”

I’ve been noticing bumper stickers saying variations of, “The end of the world is near, look busy.” To surf the tsunami of cataclysmic change, to stay just ahead of the curve, we need to be very busy being born, which also means being busy dying to our denser identifications and false personality structures. I will have much more to say about this in my upcoming Tolkien study, Casting Precious into the Cracks of Doom—Androgny, Alchemy, Evolution, and the One Ring, but here is a brief preview:

Tolkien wrote in a letter, “It is a fallen world, and there is no consonance between our bodies, minds and souls.” This is a dissonance we can begin to heal right now by expanding our awareness. As Aristophanes suggests in Plato’s Symposium, we may once have contained both genders, but in this fallen world our wholeness was shattered and we are (mostly) born into this realm fractured into one gender only. Consequently we tend toward an addictive, voracious hunger for some other type of person that we falsely believe will complete us. We hunger for The Precious, often in the form of The Hottie, and our obsession with obtaining The Hottie can burn holes in our mind and turn us into a wraith. (see Stop the Hottie!)Wholeness can only be found within, where it already exists, as biologically and alchemically we already have masculine and feminine within, yin and yang, and it is through the inner alchemical marriage of yin and yang that we rediscover our wholeness. Tolkien writes in a letter, “This is a fallen world. The dislocation of sex instinct is on of the chief symptoms of the Fall.” Libido, as Jung used the term (not as Freud who confined it to sex) is our life drive. The binding attribute of the Matrix in this time is the powerfully conditioned tendency for our life drive to be subverted, and lost in a focus on obtaining the external object, “The Precious,” which might be the shiny, new Ford Stomper SUV, money, worldly power or The Hottie. In each case we are caught in the centrifugal pull of our time, spinning us out into the outer darkness while the path of wholeness, empowerment, individuation and love require a centripetal withdrawal of projections onto the world and a rediscovery of our own essence.

Through shadow projection we project our darkness onto the world and blame the general darkness on specific others. Through disconnection with our inner androgyny we project wholeness onto The Hottie and feel we need them to be our savior. A typical case is that of a heterosexual man out of touch with his feminine who sees a beautiful woman and projects his soul on to her and feels he has known her from other lifetimes and that they are destined to be together. Once in a while this projection may be onto an actual soul mate, if so, the unconscious projection will still interfere with establishing an authentic relationship with an actual person. Tolkien, in a letter, writes about young men needing to see women “as companions in shipwreck not guiding stars.”

We don’t need to wait for the golden age to form the gold elixir of alchemy, the liberated spirit body that comes into being when we rediscover our inner wholeness. We can remove the splinter from our mind, even as we continue to incarnate in a splintered world.

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Copyright 2004 Jonathan Zap

Stop the Hottie!

The title, Stop the Hottie, and the writing that follows were largely determined by a synchronicity that happened in the last hour. I was walking in the parking lot of King Soopers, the setting Colorado sun illuminated everything in an orangey-yellow light that made every complexion, every hub cap, glow with the glamour of Boulder high dessert mountain town orangey-yellow sunset lighting. Metal flake paint on the late model SUVs sparkled like fairy dust. Even King Soopers itself seemed imbued with a larger than life all-American vitality, as if it were seen through the eyes of a Hudson River School painter while Aaron Copeland’s Appalachian Spring played in the background.

I had just left a friend’s basement, the lighting in there was terrible, but he provided me with something that enhanced my appreciation of colors and turned the intuitive part of my mind way, way up, while turning the part of my mind that focused on practical and mundane items way, way down. This was a most welcome shift in the ratio of these two psychic functions as practical, somewhat mechanical tasks, had been dominating a great part of my waking life for the past two days.

At the edge of the King Sooper’s parking lot, bathed in orangey-yellow light, my vision was arrested by a hexagonal red stop sign. In the center of the giant O of the “STOP” was a mylar sticker, that although slightly weathered and partly ripped away, was in this lighting sparkling like red and blue sapphire in a field of pavé diamond. The sticker depicted a little winking “cow girl” sex toy. This was the sort of cheesy cow girl fantasy that your worst stereotype of a truck driver would blow a quarter on in a Texas truck stop. Probably the sticker was purchased by a 13 year old boy of the sort that lived the ADD, Ritalin, M-80s, violent cartoon, ultra sour candy type of life style. Impulsively, he had blown a quarter on it, and then seeing the utter cheesyness of what he had gotten, decided to slap it on a stop sign in a random Ritalin-driven gesture of juvenile vandalism and ineffectual rebellion.

Set in a circular version of the American Flag, was a seductive cow girl glowing with fiery mylar sparkles. She wore a cowboy hat, a breast-revealing red halter top with a white star in the middle above an exposed midriff, and sparkling blue panties over leather cowgirl pants. And in case this subtlety of costume wasn’t enough to hook a prospective sticker purchaser, she was also winking gigantically, and twirled a lasso with which she was improbably lassoing her own left leg. Her form and gestures seemed to express some very basic reptilian truck stop fantasy, something like, “Hey big cowboy, you’ve lassoed yourself one hunk of hot, wet cowgirl pussy tonight!!!”

I stared with fascination at this sticker, recognizing that it was the perfect manifestation in cultural artifact of that emergent archetype I’ve been writing so much about recently, “The Hottie.” Of course, there are zillions of artifacts all around us depicting The Hottie, but never before had I seen a winking self-lassoing mylar cow girl right in the center of the “O” of a hexagonal stop sign. She was the center of what looked like a giant zero at the center of the word that better than any other in the English language expresses that most basic of messages: “STOP!” Hence the title and theme: “STOP THE HOTTIE!” (I immediately pulled out my camera and photographed this archetypal artifact from all sorts of angles. Through the camera viewfinder, zoomed in close, the colors enhanced by a polarizing filter, the cow girl seemed to glow and wink right out of the collective unconscious.)

So what exactly is a Hottie, and why does it need to be stopped? “Hottie,” as far as I can tell, is a word of recent American coinage. My guess is that so many people were wearing out the adjective “hot” by saying, “She’s so hot!” and “He’s so hot!” that someone decided to make this abused adjective a noun, and a new word—-“Hottie”—–was born.

The concept, Hottie, implies the eye of a beholder. Somewhere there must be a perceiver for whom the Hottie is that sexy person making a throbbing, red blip on the radar screen of their prowling sexual fantasy. Hotties may occur naturally, or may be manufactured. Hottie providers include some of the largest, most revenue-producing industries on the planet. Pornography, as you probably know, is up there with big oil, the drug trade and pharmaceuticals in the stratosphere of mega industry. If you add in prostitution, much of Hollywood and various music and fashion industries, you begin to realize that the providing and soliciting of Hotties is the largest industry on a planet abounding with gigantic industries. Professional Hottie, Britney Spears, is a major industry just by herself, with a net worth of close to half a billion, her share in the billions of commercial revenue she has generated, without even including all the Britney internet fantasy porn sites.

Last week I saw a recent French movie called, “Bon Voyage.” The setting is France at the outbreak of World War Two. The main characters include the French Minister of the Interior, a Jewish professor who has in his car the only heavy water in the world—essential to the production of nuclear weapons, a German agent who wants to capture the heavy water for the Nazi secret weapons program, and a writer who has been wrongly imprisoned for murder. You would think that such people, in those circumstances, would have a lot of heavy stuff on their minds, but most of them, and most of the plot, centered around pursuit of The Hottie. One of the main hotties in the movie was a glamorous movie staress, who manipulates men in the most obvious of ways—faking crying fits, etc.—–and who is not above murdering an inconvenient boyfriend and getting another boyfriend to dispose of the body.

So is this the type of Hottie that needs to be stopped? Am I saying that we need to stop Britney, mylar cowgirls, and French movie staresses? That would be the solution of Islamic Fundamentalism, which forces anyone of the female persuasion to walk around with a black tarp covering up any glimmer of Hottiness. The most essential thing to realize about the Hottie, is that the Hottie is not so much a person, as it is a fantasy that exists in the mind of the beholder, the Hottie Projector. The Hottie fantasy is projected by the beholder on to some person or image, and sometimes the person or image is not trying to be hot, but is perceived as a Hottie anyway, and sometimes the person or image is designed, like a target, to attract the attention of Hottie Projectors.

Hottie Projectors are probably a substantial majority of people between the ages of puberty and withered elderhood. You know who you are. But there is also a minority of persons who are not Hottie Projectors, and this may be because their hormone levels don’t support this addictive obsession, or their eros is too evolved, or their attention is completely consumed by a struggle for survival, or some other obsession consumes their attention. Besides the Hottie Projectors, there is also an overlapping group that is obsessed with trying to be the Hottie, and the will to be a Hottie can be so intense that it will motivate some people to undergo the surgeon’s knife, to starve themselves, endure punishing workouts, and spend fortunes on costumes and cosmetics. I’m not talking about healthy efforts to look your best, so much as the feverish, consuming obsession with becoming the Hottie no matter what the cost. To this group add another overlapping group that are depressed, even despairing, because they are not the Hottie, or can’t get the Hottie, or got the Hottie but then the Hottie got away, or maybe the Hottie didn’t get away, maybe they even married the Hottie, but then the Hottie outlived their Hottiehood years, or maybe they are a Hottie and have succumbed to some of the soul-destroying temptations that come with Hottiehood, or maybe they stalk the Hottie, or buy all the Hottie’s CDs and products, but never obtain the Hottie in the flesh, or they have obtained the Hottie and are so caught up in living out their fantasies with the Hottie, that life is passing them by without their noticing. If the amount of human psychic energy, that in one way or the other, was devoted to the Hottie were expressed as a physical force, it would surely be the equivalent of enough hydrogen bombs to give a Republican President a gigantic hard-on.

So am I trying to stop all that? Am I trying to stand like a school crossing guard with my hand up in the STOP gesture before the thermonuclear power of the Hottie? The history of people trying to say STOP! to various forms of sexuality is so riddled with hypocrisy, insanity, projection and sadism that I assure you I have no interest in being the school crossing guard of anyone else’s sexuality. Wherever it rears its ugly head I am opposed to “One size fits all.” And nowhere does one size fits all fail to fit all more than with the fantastic and surreal variations of human eros.

So when I say “Stop the Hottie!,” I am saying that for myself, for my projections, the Hottie in the stop sign was my synchronicity, and I share this only because I imagine that there may be others who may be tired of handing their power over to the Hottie archetype. I only seek to preach to those who know themselves to be in the choir, to those who are tired of Hottie soap operas, and I’m not trying to convert those who are of the Hottie persuasion, and have the Hottie as their religion, and image of salvation. If the Hottie quest works for you, go with it if you want. I’m not going to stand between anyone and their Hottie, don’t much want to be a school crossing guard holding up a paper STOP sign before a rushing orangey-red river of volcanic magma.

Only you can stop the Hottie within, and even if you are committed to reclaiming that projection, you may find this to be a daunting project, so heavily conditioned are we to chase the Hottie, that giving that up may prove nearly as difficult as the Hottie itself.

As I have written in my study of the Tolkien mythology, Casting Precious into the Cracks of Doom—Androgyny, Alchemy and the One Ring, chasing the Hottie is the most obvious case of grasping for Precious, the One Ring. I won’t go into every intricacy of that symbolism here, but the One Ring begins as Sauron’s Hottie. He has given away so much of his power in the creation of this Precious that he must get it back, and if it is destroyed, his physical form, and all that it has manifested, is destroyed. Like the Hottie, the Precious has an ability to burn holes in the mind of anybody vulnerable to its power. On one level, the One Ring is the emblem of what happens when power is projected onto an outside object. The projector becomes obsessed with capturing this Precious, or if he has captured it, he strives to greedily hold on to it. This obsession becomes so consuming that it eventually turns the projector into a Ring Wraith, or a Gollum. Even noble-hearted Frodo ultimately fails to be able to cast Precious into the cracks of doom.

The Hottie, like the Precious, conveys a powerful, illusory message that it has what is needed for completion. The gold ring is the perfect symbol of wholeness. The circle is a divine shape—-the Sanskrit definition of God is a circle whose center is everywhere, and circumference is nowhere. A circle represents wholeness, the gold ring particularly so. The gold ring has a relationship to the yin-yang symbol, it has an interweaving of opposites. The feminine aspect of the ring is its coital shape, able to be penetrated by a finger. It’s feminine aspect is encoded in its shape, but perfect shapes are part of the yang realm of the Creative. It’s specific materiality is its feminine aspect. But in its specific materiality, it is made of the most solar or yang of elements—-gold. The One Ring in the Tolkien movies was modeled after someone’s wedding ring. So the ring embodies the alchemical marriage of yin and yang, masculine and feminine. The problem is that the alchemical marriage of yin and yang needs to happen within, when it is instead pursued as a Hottie or other magical object on the outside it becomes the golden shackle binding us ever deeper to Maya/Matrix. Wholeness is never found outside, to pursue it externally is to begin the process of becoming withered into an obsessive wraith.

Aristophanes, in Plato’s Symposium, says that before we incarnated in our present forms we were spherical beings containing both genders, but on this plane we are fractured into (usually) gender specific bodies. A painful and illusory consequence of this split is that we would seek some other, some Hottie perhaps, to complete us, to be “our better half.” But two halves don’t make a whole, they make a quarter. If you did, however, rediscover the inner wholeness you always had within, then you would be in a great place to have healthy, relationships without addictive, obsessed codependence.

The more imbalanced we are, the less we have integrated the masculine and feminine elements within, the more voraciously will we pursue them on the outside. But we can never regain our inner wholeness by seeking to import it from outside. If we are missing part of our inner wholeness we become a hungry ghost forever trying to devour this missing inner ingredient in an addictive all consuming and never satiated effort to find it in the outside world. The more we identify with our present bodies, the more incomplete and limited we feel, and the more we feel that we must have the body of the Hottie (to be it and/or to capture it) to achieve salvation. The more we tighten our grasp, the more the Hottie, the Precious, slips through our fingers.

The characters best able to resist the power of the One Ring—-Bombadil, Aragorn, Gandalf, Galadriel and the other elves, Faramir, Sam—-all have a healthy balance of integrated masculine and feminine qualities. The ones who are most readily corrupted by ring lust—-Boromir, Denethor, Saruman, Sauron—are all notably lacking in the feminine. They lack the inner androgyny or wholeness, are overbalanced toward an arid masculinity and therefore crave the outside object, the Precious, with the most addictive hunger.

In this realm, those most integrated with the androgynous principle of inner wholeness, those most aware that their power or essence is not a function of their present bodily form, are those best able to resist the power of the Precious, the outside object, the Hottie.

During this period of alignment with the black hole at the center of our galaxy (which I have compared to the Cracks of Doom, as both are places where even the most dense external objects are irrealized) we need to cast Precious into the Cracks of Doom. We don’t need to stop the Hottie, we need to stop the illusory belief that the Hottie or any externalized Precious can bring us wholeness.

To unplug from Maya/Matrix we need to see that the Hottie is not our energy source. Imagine the following thought experiment. You enter a crypt filled with pirate treasure. The crypt is absolutely dark. You have a flashlight with you and switch it on. You gasp as the flashlight beam illuminates red rubies, glittering gold, green emeralds and cobalt blue sapphires. What beautiful colors these precious objects have!

Actually, this is the illusion of projection, these objects have no color, no light energy, the light, color and energy are mere reflections and refractions of the white light of the flashlight which contains all colors. Freud noticed something similar about the sexuality of the modern person as compared to the “primitive.” The primitive worshipped the mysterious inner fire, and the object on whom this might be bestowed was secondary. The modern person conversely sees all the magic and fire in the outside object (in another words, the Hottie) and fails to recognize the mystery and power of their inner fire. Some guy sees Britney on television and says, “She’s so hot!” Actually, she’s an odorless, touchless, two inch pixel phantom moving beneath a glass screen. What’s hot is his inner fire, the power that he forever gives away to the image, fantasy or person of the Hottie.

Some of us are being called to reclaim that inner fire, to recall the inner power that we project outward binding us to the matrix, to cast Precious into the Cracks of Doom, regain our inner wholeness and Stop the Hottie!

>Self Portrait

© Copyright 2004 by Jonathan Zap

Note: Most of the following concerns time, but in the first section, I introduce Tolkien’s elf mythology which is often counter intuitive to people who have seen the movies, and even for those who have read the trilogy. In the ring trilogy Tolkien vividly describes particular elf characters as so exemplary and heroic that it often comes as a surprise to discover in his notes and letters that he considers the elves as almost developmentally disabled. The first section explains Tolkien’s ambivalent and paradoxical view of the elves which is necessary to understand the second section which concerns time perception.

(Note: Since I have been victimized by plagiarists in the past, I am purposefully not footnoting my quotes to make things a bit more difficult for them. As always, feedback of any kind is welcome.)

Who are the elves and what meanings do they have for us? Tolkien has conscious views of the elves which are expressed in his writings, particularly his letters, but there are also other layers of meanings, which are implied or which manifest directly out of the creative muse, with or without Tolkien’s conscious approval. I believe that elves have such a resonance and inner recognition for us because they are a real biological form (if not necessarily carbon-based) which we recognize from within. (for much more on my view of the elves see Parallel Journeys, and The Glorified Body–Metamorphosis of the Body and the Crisis Phase of Human Evolution). For me, the elves resonate with the future as well as the past.

Tolkien saw the elves as “man before the fall.” He did not, however, altogether idealize them. There was an anti-life aspect to the elves in his mythology in their desire to preserve and live in the past. Tolkien disparagingly referred to them several times as “embalmers.” Despite their love of nature, the elves were just the opposites of Taoists in that they resisted change and sought to live in an “embalmed” past. In a letter Tolkien writes,

But the elves are not wholly good or in the right. Not so much because they had flirted with Sauron; as because with or without his assistance they were ‘embalmers’. They wanted to have their cake and eat it; to live in the mortal historical Middle-earth because they had become fond of it (and perhaps because they there had the advantages of a superior caste), and so tried to stop its change and history, stop its growth, keep it as a pleasuance, even largely a desert, where they could be ‘artists’—and they were overburdened with sadness and nostalgic regret.

I have to wonder here if Tolkien might not be projecting an aspect of his own elvish creative muse onto the elves. For Tolkien, an Oxford philologist obsessed with old English dialects, the distant past was numinous, and most aspects of his present era were abhorrent to him. Besides his contempt for modern technology he also disliked most modern literature. And for him, Shakespeare was a detested modern upstart. So when he talks about elves as, “artists…overburdened with sadness and nostalgic regret.” maybe this is a reflection of his own creative magic which drew inspiration from the past and cringed from the present with distaste.

Tolkien, like Dickens, had an early childhood in a beautiful, bucolic place which was scarcely altered from earlier centuries. His fall from this childhood paradise into grimy, industrialized modernism (like Dicken’s descent into the blacking warehouse and London’s underworld) created a bitter nostalgia for a lost time. Also, as a class conscious Englishman, he may have resented his status as a middle class academic, and sensed that in some other realm he had a higher caste or status. Perhaps this is why he refers to the elves fondness for historical Middle Earth, “…because they had become fond of it (and perhaps because they there had the advantages of a superior caste)” Note the reference to “prestige” in another letter that is a variation on the same themes,

…..we see a sort of second fall or at least ‘error’ of the Elves. There was nothing wrong essentially in their lingering against counsel, still sadly with the mortal lands of their old heroic deeds. But they wanted to have their cake without eating it. They wanted the peace and bliss and perfect memory of ‘The West’, and yet to remain on the ordinary earth where their prestige as the highest people, above wild Elves, dwarves, and Men, was greater than at the bottom of the hierarchy of Valinor. They thus became obsessed with ‘fading’, the mode in which the changes of time (the law of the world under the sun) was perceived by them. They became sad, and their art (shall we say) antiquarian, and their efforts all really a kind of embalming — even though they also retained the old motive of their kind, the adornment of the earth, and the healing of its hurts.

(That concludes the introduction and now follows the section on time:)

Tolkien recognizes that the nature of time, qualitatively and quantitatively, depends on the psyche and essence of the observer. As consciousness alters, so does the perception of time. We all have experienced this. Time runs differently when you are hurrying to an appointment with a thousand worried details crowding your mind than when you are walking through the woods on a long summer afternoon. Some thoughts and theories I have about time are relevant here, so I’m going to mention them before I explore time in the Tolkien mythology.

I frequently find myself trying to clarify with people the two very different senses in which time may be said to go slow. The first case of time going slow is the sense of time dragging, the nine-to-fiver watching the clock, the school kid waiting to be saved by the bell. This is time being experienced as oppressive while in a ghetto of meaning, a wasteland or flatland. In the meaning ghetto, as Jung described it, “The life-giving rhythms of the eons becomes the dread ticking of the clock.”

The second case of time slowing is related to an intensification of consciousness, awareness, presence. For example, your first day in a new country would seem very long, not because it was boring or time was dragging, but because of novelty, the density of new things to be aware of, the opposite of a predictable overly familiar environment. An analog, that I’ve used to illustrate this involves motion picture photography. In early silent films time appears to go fast in an unpleasant way, people scurry like ants and seem mechanical and jerky in their movements. The reason for this is that the film running through the camera was going slow. Moving picture film needs to go through the camera at a minimum of seventeen frames per second (fps) to get more lifelike motion. Slow motion photography, which enhances our awareness of some high speed event, requires that the film goes through the camera much faster, say seventy fps. When played back at normal speed time slows down in the projected film in a very desirable way. The camera is analogous to the psyche of the observer. The more “neurological events,” or more accurately, the more monads or units of consciousness awareness occurring per second, the more time slows down for the observer. For example, if your car starts spinning out on the freeway adrenaline rushes into your bloodstream temporarily raising your body temperature several degrees. Neurological activity intensifies greatly. Cognitive process speeds up and time slows down. When you are driving uneventfully on the highway by contast, minutes, even hours, may slip by unnoticed, but during the spin-out, in a heightened state of alertness, each heart beat can seem like an eternity. The camera is going faster and therefore the projected reality slows down.

I first remember experiencing this time-slowing effect when I was severely mauled by a dog when I was ten years old. My ordinary ego and time sense seemed to step aside and I found myself in a zone of slow time and greatly heightened awareness. Frank Herbert, author of the classic Dune books, describes many characters capable of this time sense, and apparently he experienced it in his own life. Once he was driving his family at high speed and encountered a situation that involved an open drawbridge and what should have been a fatal, no win automotive scenario. Time slowed down to such an extent that he could calmly consider, like an engineer, dozens of possible solutions to the emergency before selecting one that only a Hollywood stunt man would have dared, and of course it worked. More than once I have been in a life or death situation where this alteration of time sense probably saved my life.

This desirable slowing of time does not, however, require an emergency. People who advance in meditation discover states outside of ordinary time. Hallucinogenic experiences, which also intensify neurological metabolism and density of inner events, typically alter time sense. People who have near death experiences (which they often describe as more of an emergence than an emergency) may experience a comprehensive life review while only a few minutes may pass in the operating room.

Aside from these extraordinary situations, some people experience time quite differently from other people who are also journeying from birth to death. Some people, often older people, will say things like, “The years just fly by.” I count myself blessed that this is not the case for me. Often I will think back to where I was a week or ten days ago and that seems like another life time. When life becomes routinized, scheduled, mechanical—-when students, nine-to -fivers, retirees or whomever fall into a daily routine, then the density of consciousness declines, time may drag in the negative sense of slow time, but it also speeds up in the undesirable way of a silent film, too little is happening, or too little is being noticed, and the years just slip by. When the years fly by, then the camera is too slow or inattentive. When we are really engaged by life, when, for example, we are in the state of being that Mihaly Csikszentmihayl calls “flow,” time does not drag, and each moment is experienced with alert engagement and filled with intensity and meaning. When meaning is sucked out of experience then time drags and years slip by.

The very different types of characters and races in the Tolkien mythology
can be viewed as personifications and embodiments (but not allegorical placements!) of different types and styles of consciousness. Different types of consciousness mean different perceptions of time and this is richly illustrated in Tolkien’s writings. (see also Clock Time Metastisizes Toward 2012)

Gandalf the Gray’s fall in the Mines of Moria, and the torments and death of an identity he experienced, can be viewed archetypally as the classic ego death, the dark night of the soul that precedes rebirth (in his case emerging as Gandalf the White). The dark night of the soul involves a density or compression of time that while terrible and painful, is also quite developmental and transformative. Gandalf relates, “I strayed out of thought and time, and I wandered far on roads that I will not tell…each day was as long as a life-age of the earth.” Gandalf seems to contradict himself when he says that he wandered “out of thought and time” and then in the same sentence tells us that he had a cognitive experience of time as greatly lengthened so that each day seems like an eon. Probably he is using the license of poetic speech to communicate that he wandered out of ordinary time and thought.

In the following exchange among Legolas, Frodo and Sam we get a number of versions of time perception and both positive and negative versions of slow time:

Legolas stirred in his boat. ‘Nay, time does not tarry ever,’ he said; but change and growth is not in all things and places alike. For the Elves the world moves, and it moves both very swift and very slow. Swift, because they themselves change little, and all else fleets by: it is a grief to them. Slow, because they do not count the running years, not for themselves. The passing seasons are but ripples ever repeated in the long long stream. Yet beneath the Sun all things must wear to an end at last.

But the wearing is slow in Lorien, said Frodo. The power of the Lady is on it. Rich are the hours, though short they seem, in Caras Galadon, where Galadriel wields the Elven-ring.

….But so it is, Sam: in that land you lost your count. There time flowed swiftly by us, as for the Elves. The old moon passed, and a new moon waxed and waned in the world outside, while we tarried here.

Legolas expresses a clear awareness of observer dependent time. He says that “…time does not tarry ever…” which suggests that he believes that time has an unvarying existence outside of the observer and is a stable frame of reference (I’m not agreeing or disagreeing, but this is what Legolas suggests). When he says that, “For the Elves the world moves, and it moves both very swift and very slow.” He appears to be coming from Tolkien’s POV of the elves as developmentally stunted, stagnant, the elves as embalmers. Remember that the elves are, according to the Tolkien mythology, disadvantaged by their excessive longevity which Tolkien considers a “premature immortality” which tends toward stagnation. The elves are like a sentimental, nostalgic elderly person whose gaze is caught in memory and longing for the past. The neglect of contemporary time means that the years fly by, “…Swift, because they themselves change little, and all else fleets by: it is a grief to them…” The inner stagnation also creates a slowness in time because of its monotonous predictability, “…but ripples ever repeated in the long long stream. Yet beneath the Sun all things must wear to an end at last.” In the last statement Legolas describes time as entropic, as under the rule of the second law of thermodynamics, which is psychologically in the ascendant for the stagnant psyche which is much more analagous to a closed system than a dyanmic, developing psyche.

Frodo, however, has an altogether different perception of elf time than Legolas because for him being in the realm of the elves is highly novel, he is a traveler in a foreign and exotic place so for him time is slow and swift in exactly the opposite way, “But the wearing is slow in Lorien, said Frodo. The power of the Lady is on it. Rich are the hours, though short they seem.” For Frodo the hours are rich because this is all new for him while the elves are experiencing endlessly repeated ripples. But when Legolas speaks to Sam he seems to have entirely missed that for the hobbits fast and slow have had an opposite meaning, and he presumes that their time sense was merely entrained by that of the elves.

© Jonathan Zap, 2004

>Satan Smiting Job
Satan Smiting Job by William Blake

Yes, dark, shocking events may feel like an affront to our sense of rightness and our wish to see consciousness advancing in a perceivable way against ignorance, but we also need to recognize that these are ego judgments and the way of evolution is diverse and roundabout, a weird zig-zag path that confound discernment.

From the point of view of the I Ching and Taoism, the universe is unfolding as it should, but its way of unfolding may not be perceived as satisfactory to the supervisory ego. Evolution seems to require evil as a developmental necessity and forces of darkness often paradoxically advance the light. The I Ching tells us that some things do not fully blossom or expand until they are fully compressed or oppressed.

Consider the following paradoxical example of the way of evolution. In the last twenty years the evolution of the marijuana plant as a psycho-active medicine has gone into hyper-drive, the marijuana of today is many, many times more psycho-actively potent than it was just a few years ago. There is alive today one man who is far more directly responsible for this evolution than anyone else. As a thought experiment stop for a moment and think who that could be.

The answer is Bush, the Father, the first President Bush. Counter intuitive isn’t it? Remember that the first Bush revved up the “War on Drugs” and among other actions sealed off the border with Mexico. Far less cheap Mexican weed was coming across, so prices went way up. This was a great boost to the home growing industry. Also, since penalties were assigned based on weight, not quality, cultivators realized that they took the same risk, but had a much greater profit margin by boosting the potency of their product. Also with greater profits, thanks to Bush, they had more money and leisure to get creative and hybridize strains and perfect their vocation. Darkness attempts to oppress this plant and instead it blossoms all the more, its evolution exponentiated in a short time.

For a much more thorough discussion on the evolutionary need for evil (individually and collectively) read Part IV of A Guide to the Perplexed Interdimensional Traveler on my web site.

Tolkien’s mythology has many profound things to say about the nature of evil. In a very Taoist way it recognizes that evil, like every other quality, is cyclic, it ebbs and flows, has seasons of advance and retreat. The individual has a role to play within these seasons, can resist darkness and seek to advance the light, but must also accept the macro historical cycle he or she is in:

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.

“So do I, said Gandalf, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us. And already, Frodo, our time is beginning to look black.”

“For however the fortune of war shall go, may it not so end that much that was fair and wonderful shall pass forever out of Middle-earth?”

“It may”, said Gandalf. “The evil of Sauron cannot be wholly cured, nor made as if it had not been. But to such days we are doomed. Let us now go on with the journey we have begun!”

‘Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary. Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succor of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.’

Tolkien was aware of the Perennial Philosophy (makes reference to it somewhere in his letters) and saw the world evolving through a cycle of great ages (see The Mutant versus The Machine—the End of the Iron Age and the Galactic Alignment of 2012). The Hobbit and the Ring Trilogy occur within a thin slice of time in Tolkien’s larger mythology (The Simarillion). The events of the trilogy constitute a great turning, a liminal space where we are on the cusp of the end of one age and the beginning of another. In the cycle of world ages of the perennial philosophy (gold, silver, bronze, iron) spiritual light decreases by one fourth as we go from gold to iron. Tolkien writes in the first book of the trilogy,

“Yet I do not believe that the world about us will ever again be as it was of old, or the light of the Sun as it was aforetime.”

Saruman also recognizes that they are at the cusp of a cycle shift:

“The Elder days are gone. The Middle Days are passing. The Younger Days are beginning…”

When the dark principle has reached its point of maximum power there is a turning point, and the light principle begins to grow. This cycle shift is described perfectly by I Ching hexagram #24 called “The Turning Point” (for a fuller discussion of the hexagram go to Some things to Consider before an I Ching Reading. Related to the calendar this is the winter solstice where the nights have gotten as long as they can and now the daylight will begin to grow again. In the trilogy the turning point is identified with the resurrection of Gandalf as Gandalf the white. He appears like the white yang dot in the black yin of the yin-yang symbol:

“We meet again. At the turn of the tide. The great storm is coming, but the tide has turned. Yes, I am white now…”

Near the end of the third book Gandalf proclaims,

“The New Age begins,”

The terms “New Age” and “Age of Aquarius” were coined by Carl Jung. There is considerable evidence from the collective unconscious that we may need an intensification of darkness to end the Iron Age, the Age of Pisces, and bring on the Age of Aquarius, a new Golden Age. (for a discussion of this evidence see Chapter V of my book The Capsule of Intentionality on web site, a thorough discussion is also in the two DVDs I did recently with John Jenkins: Dialouges about Prophecy and the End of Time and Looking Toward the Event Horizon—see products and services on site) Although the precession of ages is a recurrent cycle, the cycle is an evolutionary spiral rather than a circle where you end up exactly where you started. Each age is to some extent unprecedented:

…in every age there come forth things that are new and have no foretelling, for they do not proceed from the past.

Although new ages involve the unprecedented, the difference between good and evil, Tolkien believes, is classical and constant:

“How shall a man judge what to do in such times?”

“As he ever has judged,” said Aragorn. “Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man’s part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.”

A classic aspect of evil is that it is often done by power-trippers who have a rationale, an end to justify their means, and this usually involves an urge toward bringing “order” to a chaotic world situation. In the Star Wars mythology, Darth Vader seductively entreats his son Luke,

“Join me, and together we can end this destructive conflict and bring order to the galaxy.”

Similarly, Saruman tries to seduce Gandalf:

“The time of the Elves is over, but our time is at hand: the world of Men, which we must rule. But we must have power, power to order all things as we will, for that good which only the Wise can see….There is no hope left in Elves or dying Numenor. This then is one choice before you, before us. We may join with that Power….the Wise, such as you and I, may with patience come at last to direct its courses, to control it. We can bide our time, we can keep our thoughts in our hearts, deploring maybe evils done by the way, but approving the high and ultimate purpose: Knowledge, Rule, Order; all the things that we have so far striven in vain to accomplish, hindered rather than helped by our weak or idle friends. There need not be, there would not be, any real change in our designs, only in our means.”

In the Taoist quotes that I recently excerpted on the website (The Taoist Path) a very similar recognition occurs,

Such a person will threaten others, force his will upon others, and even murder others not out of passion but out of something much more deadly—rationale. He will justify his actions according to ideology, patriotism, religion, and principle.

The desiccated and reduced form of this evil appears in our world in the bureaucratic face of evil, the banality of evil as Hannah Arendt called it. To the extent that a Dick Cheney, or someone of that ilk, morally justifies what they do, it will usually come down to this “ordering” rationale. The more possessed may even claim that their order came from God. The lesser will claim that they were merely, “Following orders.”

The opposite of the power principle—Do unto others before they do unto you, is the principle of symbiosis, mutual consent and symbiosis. This is expressed by Treebeard,

“I am not going to do anything with you: not if you mean by that ‘do something to you’ without your leave. We might do some things together. I don’t know about sides. I go my own way, but your way may go along with mine for a while.”

Finally, Tolkien recognizes the developmental need for evil. As a “subcreator” (Tolkien’s own term) he knows that to have a subcreated world, to have a story, the subcreator/story-maker must create evil. After all, what would the trilogy be about if not for Sauron, Saruman, Gollum, Orcs and Ring Wraiths? Hobbits going on dates with other hobbits? Tolkien recognizes,

There cannot be any ‘story’ without a fall—all stories are ultimately about the fall—at least not for human minds as we know them and have them. So, proceeding, the Elves have a fall, before their ‘history’ can become storial.

Tolkien had a similar view of eschaton or end time as Terence McKenna. Rather than a doomsday, Tolkien spoke of a “eucatastrophy,” an anti-catastrophe where the divine would be restored to this fallen world. Terrance said that it was more rational to see a “big surprise” as coming at the end of a complexifying process rather than at the beginning as straight science does (the Big Bang). Tolkien, in his notes, referring to the God Figure of his mythology, Eru, says,

As may a master in the telling of tales keep hidden the greatest moment until it comes in due course. It may be guessed at indeed, in some measure, by those of us who have listened with full heart and mind.

Those who have listened with “full heart and mind” are the more intuitive people who have noticed the signals from the collective unconscious. (permutations of what I call the Singularity Archetype—-See Chapter V of The Capsule of Intentionality).

Tolkien’s view of the eschaton also has parallels to Teihard de Chardin’s Omega Point. (“Arda”) is Tolkien’s synonym for the earth,

…they say that the One will himself enter into Arda, and heal Men and all the Marring from the beginning to the end.

Dark events, especially apocalyptic events, may bring the Omega Point, a new Golden Age closer. Finally, according to the I Ching, the best way to deal with evil is not necessarily to fight it, which tends to sharpen its fangs, but to make energetic progress in the good.