The VALIS Hack

BYTE: Just to put four or five stories to rest, where did the name Apple Computer actually come from?

WOZNIAK: It came out of Steve Jobs’s head, and he’s a sort of private person, so I can’t say what led up to it. He came up with an inspiration. He was working from time to time in the orchards up in Oregon. I thought that it might be because there were apples in the orchard or maybe just its fructarian nature. Maybe the word just happened to occur to him. In any case, we both tried to come up with better names, but neither one of us could think of anything better after Apple was mentioned.

This is the first Apple logo: Newton's apple of inspiration. The story of Newton and his apple of inspiration was no doubt as manufactured as the story of how Apple Computer got its logo. The apple is that ancient fruit from the Tree of Knowledge - the knowledge of "self" - or ego. It may have been a mushroom or it may have been alien genetics or it may have been millions of years of natural evolution, but it sure as hell wasn't an actual apple. Be that as it may, the split with Id is all wrapped up into the symbol of the bitten apple.

Lucifer, the Morning Star, gives the gift of knowledge, his planet is Venus. Venus charts a pentagram in the sky with its route, the apple's seeds are arranged in a pentagram, or a 5 pointed star. A happy coincidence for the apple, the world's most notorious fruit.

I've been drinking a fermented cider beverage lately, called Newton's Folly...

 and we know that Newton's "folly" was alchemy. Computers are like alchemy?

I propose that yes, they are. They, and especially the internet, HTML and CSS, show the basic relationship between above and below - the Word/code and the 3D world/screen. All the world's a web page, and HTML/YHWH, is the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega.

The Kobayashi Maru

In Star Trek 11, Captain Kirk's first notch in his belt of infamy was defeating the Kobayashi Maru - a computer created, no-win simulation that always results in death. Captain Kirk doesn't believe in no-win situations, and he hacks the computer in order to prove his point. As his new programming takes affect, he takes a big bite out of an apple.

Death is the no-win situation, and this was exactly the goal of the alchemist and Sir Isaac Newton - to defeat death - to defeat Adam's curse.

I've become fascinated by this analogy, that our perception of reality is the computer screen, while the code behind the screen is what makes it all happen. Building web sites and web pages, we use Adobe Dreamweaver, a rather exact metaphor for what is really going on.

In creating a website, you have to be rather exact, and even a misplaced comma will fuck it all up. This is much like the rituals of a magic spell, that must be rigidly adhered to. When you get it right, its the voila! moment, and you actually see it, on screen. WYSIWYG, or "what you see is what you get".

Saw this yellow truck a few days ago, while pondering...

We all know that a computer runs on code, and I would suggest that our own, inner computers, are no different. Our code is made up of symbols, that have the power to actually change our "screen", or what we call "reality". Just say the Word.

OK, maybe it's not quite that simple, but the idea is simple. Of course, the devil is in the details. The important thing is to consider the idea, and perhaps conduct personal experiments if the spirit moves you. This is one result of my own experimenting. Meager, but at least... something. I do feel the need for some practical magic, right about now.

Thomas Edison was famous for trying thousands of times before he finally got it right. Alchemy is much the same.

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."

We are now in HTML 5:

Bite the Apple

Cliff's New York Adventure

Even though I'm a huge fan of Disney's The Rocketeer, I admit to never having read the book, until now. David Stevens created The Rocketeer, an adventure story set in a pulp-fiction style 1930s, about a down-on-his-luck pilot named Cliff Secord who finds a mysterious rocket pack - the Cirrus X-3.

We've noted the Grail signifier in the story, the "twin-towers" of the rocket pack, the divine feminine or 'anima' represented by his girlfriend Betty, modeled after 50's pin-up girl Betty Page. Cliff, being a daredevil type, is a cliff diver, or a Fool, the soul stepping off the precipice into egoic incarnation.

Cliff, like Captain America, is always fighting Nazis, or "not sees" as Jake Kotze calls them. The "Not Sees" who cannot see the walls of Plato's Cave - we are completely taken in by the illusion, cinema, chimera. Which brings me to Cliff's Big New York Adventure, where Cliff finally meets the Magician - face to face.

Throughout the series, Cliff is haunted by shadowy types who seem to always be one step ahead of him, and they are not necessarily antagonists in the classic sense, but more like mysterious strangers, or perhaps "men in black". It reminds me of Mark Twain's No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger... in earlier versions of the book he named the character Satan.

Stevens uses a "sharp dressed man" as the short hand for the Magician, or Satan, most often in a tux. The names may change but the character remains the same. We see Howard Hughes, Jonas, and Orsino all playing the same role, and even Cliff dons the tux from time to time.

Care for a light?

Alan Abbadessa-Green sent me this priceless pic of the Rocketeer as Prometheus as Rockefeller. We recall that Prometheus stole fire from the Gods, and Cliff certainly "stole" the rocket pack from whoever invented it.

In the final act, all is revealed. As a teenager, Cliff had worked the carny circuit, an assistant to "The Great Arsino". Every day he was in his usual spot, locked in a trunk under twelve feet of water, waiting for Orsino to spring him. Lothar would hold up his hour-glass, letting the crowd know how much time he had left. But Orsino (playing Harry Houdini, another double H) always got that trunk open. The crowd ate it up.

Until... one day Cliff was seduced by Lucy, and didn't make it to the performance. He lost his virginity, and that was the day that poor little Teena died, who had loved him so much she stood in for him so that he wouldn't lose his job. But her little lungs couldn't hold enough air.

And that night was the night that Lothar, or Saturn, the Grim Reaper, became his dread enemy. Like Lothar, we're just not buying it, anymore.

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God ~Romans 3:23

Like Adam after biting the big apple, Cliff is cast out of the Garden, or the Carny. He wanders to and fro in confusion, but against all odds, he finds a rocket pack. And he carries that rocket pack in a sack wherever he goes. I will leave it to the initiates to discover what is inside the "back pack" of the Fool.



Watch your step.

The Two Towers

The Two Towers

I was chatting with Alan Green last night about the new London Bridge Shard, which I sense is the "twin" of the new One World Trade Center in Manhattan. The Shard was topped out in April 2012, the OWTC is scheduled for topping out in August. Both are "pillarmids" to use Jake Kotze's word - skyscrapers that evoke both pillars and pyramids in their symbolism. The Shard is Europe's tallest building, while OWTC, at a symbolic 1776 ft. including spire, will be the tallest building in the New World.

I see this as a "hands across the waters" thing, the twin towers destroyed in the 9/11 attacks rebuilt, one in the United Kingdom and the other in the United States.

Much has been made of the Statue of Liberty between the WTC towers, representing Isis/High Priestess (the Holy of Holies) between the two pillars of Jachin and Boaz. I consider the WTC to have represented the Masonic third temple of Solomon.

The Three Mary's

Isis is also called Stella Maris, or "Star of the Sea". There are many Catholic parishes in maritime locations called "Our Lady, Star of the Sea". The word Mary has its root in Mar - the sea. So we have these two new pillars standing quite literally on either side of Mary, AKA the Atlantic Ocean, or Atlantis.

A piece of the Emerald Tablet of Thoth/Hermes

In the 2006 film, Superman Returns, Lex Luthor uses one of the stolen Kryptonian crystals (or shards), which he has combined with Kryptonite, to grow a new continental landmass in the Northern Atlantic Ocean. The landmass threatens to destroy Metropolis, so Superman must descend into the depths, and then lift this new continent out of the ocean and hurls it into the heavens. We see him stepping into the role of Atlas, the titan who carries the world on his shoulders, who also happens to be the first born twin son of Poseidon, the king of Atlantis. We note he is powered by the sun, and Isis/Mary's fruit is the sun/son.

Alan reminded me of The Dark Crystal:

The Dark Crystal is a 1982 British-American fantasy film directed by Jim Henson and Frank Oz. It dramatizes the story of Jen, an elflike 'Gelfling' to restore balance to his alien world by returning a lost shard to a powerful but broken gem.

Ahhh... the USA, a powerful but broken gem - the jewel in the crown, so to speak. Perhaps the former rebels are to be reunited with the Mothership... via a lost "shard".