Looping Wor(l)d

I could say this is a beautiful illustration of Venom or Carnage painted by Alex Ross. But it’s not. It’s just a screencap from one of the recent Ultraman movies. Hugely popular in Japan. What you see there is an actor in a suit.

A movie that is utterly ridiculous. They start fighting from the first minute and continue till the last, barely speaking a line of dialogue between one scene and the next. One hour and half in total. Of (extremely redundant) fighting.

It’s almost an anti-movie. The kind of stuff that is at the same time brilliant and atrocious. The whole movie takes place on CG backgrounds, so it’s all done in bluescreen. It’s not completely CG, the actors are real, only wearing costumes and 95% of the time expressionless masks. I mean, when you have a CG movie, like those made by Pixar, all the effort goes to build communicative expressions. Here instead the masks negate all form of expression from the only element that is not CG, so you have at best the posturing of trying to communicate something. Suits hiding real actors on top of fake backgrounds. There’s also something of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis since the staff that the bad guy wields makes weird piano notes when he fights.

The plot itself is a cliched hodgepodge of eastern and western plot patterns. The Ultramen are very similar to the Green Lanterns, surveying and policing the galaxy, defending the many planets from oversize dinosaur-like monsters. Their home planet risked to die after the sun exploded (like Superman), then compensated by the construction of an artificial sun that also turned all the population into masked super-heroes. A power that then lures those who are the most ambitious and want it all for themselves. The rest seems like a copy of Star Wars without plot, characters or setting (and budget). Just fights and “impressions”. And in between there’s also a father-son thing going on, with the son being exiled on another planet with a Yoda-like instructor in order to learn how to resist the lure of power and its responsibilities.

But as I said it has its charm and it should be seen, at least as a weird experiment. I had to research a bit, as the story connects here and there with other material. This is the most concise list of stuff available subtitled and directly connected material, leaving out the main series:

– Ultraman Mebius Side Story: Ghost Reverse (Part I&II) – Two half an hour special episodes that vaguely set-up the first movie
– Mega Monster Battle: Ultra Galaxy Legends – 96 minutes movie, the screenshot is taken from this
– Ultra Galaxy Side Story: Ultraman Zero Vs Darclops Zero (Part I&II) – Two half an hour special episodes setting up the sequel
– Ultraman Zero: The Revenge of Belial – 100 minutes sequel to Ultra Galaxy movie. This one is the one they say it’s good and that prompted me to watch from the start, hoping to find some trace of “plot”

They just showed this picture and called it “The Machine”, or “The System”.

In the post below I added a short clip with terrible video quality, now I found the actual mp4 source and will host on the site for simple ease of use.

The original videos can be seen though a flash player right here: http://www.enterthezohar.com/

The first six are available:

Lesson 1
Lesson 2
Lesson 3
Lesson 4
Lesson 5
Lesson 6

Some interesting and fascinating stuff that often resonates with what I studied. The real interesting part is how they underline it’s not a “religion” but a science. Meaning that they don’t ask you to have faith (preconditioned acceptance) in something, or believe in some god, or pray, or follow certain holidays or do this and that during the day. All aspects of religion are excluded and they ask you to test what they say on yourself, see if it’s true or not by yourself, dispute what they say, ask questions, disagree. The core point being that the Kabbalah is a process to “attain an higher level of reality” (like the “awakening” in The Matrix movie, or the Instrumentality project in Evangelion), breaking the layer of the physical world like a shell, and that this can be done in this mortal life, right now.

The “end” is also quite similar to Lost. There’s no promise of afterlife or paradise of the worthy. They think that the soul is just one, and immortal (no distinction between god and us, we’re just fragments of the same god). When you die you reincarnate, but carrying along exactly the level of spiritual clarity you attained in that mortal life, whatever it was able to achieve.

Yep, that’s what was the chart below from.

It’s a while I’ve been reading about hermeticism, then last week I watch the second episode of Fullmetal Alchemist and at some point they show an image of the tree of life (1, 2, 3). I decided that I wanted to know the meaning of it. Not just a general sense about what it is about, but all the symbols and writings on it. So, starting from the wikipedia, I went looking for all kinds of infos I could find, but as always on the internet, it’s easy to get lost.

The first intent was to look into bookshops to find the most complete and deep book about Kabbalah I could find. I’m not interested on the “practical” rituals and meditations that are popular nowadays, nor the most religious aspects. I wanted to read about the myths, the symbols, their meaning. I wanted to recognize words and symbol, know what they mean.

The problem is that on amazon and other book shops the majority of the material seems composed of short books (150-200 pages) that deal with some specific aspects. I wanted instead some kind of full guide that I could use as a reference every time I read about something, something exhaustive. I even tried asking on the forums to see if someone could give me hints, and discovered that it is quite popular. Many recommend books by Gershom Scholem (such as “Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism”) but I was worried that these academic works only gave historical notions but nothing really about the Kaballah itself, its meaning and mythology.

So I started looking for less orthodox books, like the tradition of the Golden Dawn. It seems that western occultism is a messy mixture of Kabbalah (the spiritual aspects) and Medieval traditions (the magical and ritualistic aspects). If you want to look for “authenticity” then the Golden Dawn is the worst starting point as possible. They put everything together and then interpret and transform things their own way. Too much made-up stuff and not enough with some kind of value. But for me they could be useful, I was just looking for the mythology and the Golden Dawn filtered all the deep religious aspects only to save the mystical and mythical ones. Problem is that only 1/5 of the books I could find was about “theory”, with the rest filled with weird magical rites and celebrations, magic formulas etc… Since I’m not going to try to evoke Cthulhu all those pages wasted on rituals were useless to me. I’m interested in the meaning of them, and what they are based on, not to know a list of instructions to do this and that.

Thanks to the internet I could delve into the books and make a better choice before I purchase something. From the occultist side I found a huge torrent that has a majority of the texts I was looking for (Israel Regardie, Waite, Eliphas Levi, Crowley and a bunch of other books on the Kabbalah). Without wasting money now I can see if there’s something in there that isn’t bullshit and is worth purchasing.

But it’s from the more authentic side that I found the most interesting material. To begin with I was looking at this textbook. It seemed big enough to be complete, then I discovered that the whole book was available through that “google preview” button. Not just a few pages, all 800+ of them. If you quickly scroll to the last pages and then move up, you can find a number of insane charts like the one I copied below. That was some interesting and fascinating stuff. The more cryptic, the more curious and intrigued I am. The same way I wanted to understand the tree of life, now I wanted to understand those charts.

Later I discover that the book is published by an association in Israel. Through their site their WHOLE literary production is available for free. Included the whole 800+ pages textbook with the crazy diagram available as a pdf download. Hooray! That is more material that I could ever hope to find. And it’s not all. This association gives free online courses. There are free downloads of the videos of the lesson in Hebrew, that are then translated in different languages, along all the material that you are supposed to use, like other books and manuals. Moreover, all the 10.000 video lessons they gave up to this point are archived and available again as free download.

The new course started yesterday and you could skip registering just by knowing the right link.

I have all I need (and more), now I only have to find the time :)

Now, can you possibly guess what is this about? Hint: it was (only partially) triggered by watching an episode of Fullmetal Alchemist. Three days of flippant internet surfing lead to that.

And no, it’s not an alien periodic table of elements.