TOBE/Inside The Grassy Knoll
Recently I had a reminder of the old Verne era when TBS was running a full day of sci-fi films. Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (a top ten favorite movie I’ve seen a dozen times) had concluded and then up rolls Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon from 1958—a  film I had not seen.

The Symbolic Realm

In the forty plus years between my first Verne movie and the present epiphany of From the Earth to the Moon, I had embarked on a life which collided with the edges of other realities: a proper Christian upbringing usurped by a teen rebellion and encounters with new age mystics, psycho-pharmacia, and ten years in the counterculture of the 1970s. Travels in the circles of musicians, poets, writers, artists, and—more mystics—sharpened my awareness of the supernatural and its dark side. 

An early occult teacher had showed me the power of symbols and their use in subliminal indoctrination via what he termed “persistent iconology”:  messages which stream seamlessly from epoch to epoch, readapting and morphing, but containing a kernel of perpetual constancy. Many of the symbols used by ancient secret societies are now part of the modern culture through corporate logos, pop culture icons, and the endless imagery which flows through the media of television, music, computers (Ever wonder about those icons on your desktop?) and film. The alchemical quest, I understood, had nothing to do with transmutation of matter---but with spirit---and the lingua franca was the symbolic.

That understanding would underscore the succeeding decades of study into the many schools of illuminism, including Freemasonry (of which I never partook, although my own family was heavily Masonic), Rosicrucianism, Cabbala, and Wikka. It took on a peculiar and vital power as I moved into Christianity and became aware that the shadows I had encountered in the occult had a counterpart in scripture---one more powerful in substance and more enduring in value.

Verne’s Predictive View

To wit, we return to the aforementioned epiphany on that October day when I viewed the opening scenes of the 1958 film (all that’s worth seeing of it), From the Earth to the Moon, with eyes wide open. The film, starring Joseph Cotton as the protagonist, Victor (named Impey in the Verne novel) Barbicane, is not a faithful adaptation of the original Verne---in fact it is a third-rate adaptation of the novel, but it did communicate the essential idea of a durable message—one which landed as a neat package at an appointed time.

In 1958 Americans were being primed for the emergence of the space age. It was, after all, the International Geophysical Year (July 1, 1957 - December 31, 1958), the year when America launched its Explorer I satellite. It was also the fateful year which saw the creation of NASA. 

The preceding year had witnessed the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik (the word literally means fellow traveler, a Masonic term heavily used in the lexicon of Communism) and the propaganda cries of the “space race” with the Soviets—a fabrication to win the sympathies and tax dollars of the American public. (The IGY was crafted by the International Council of Scientific Unions, funded by UNESCO, and included scientists from all the developed nations at that time, including the USSR.) That year also saw a bit of prescience in the film release of 20 Million Miles To Earth—wherein a space mission is organized by the government of the United States under the aegis of the Pentagon—this was the era of the spawning military-industrial complex.

What is apparent in the Verne story line, and amplified (deliberately) in the film, is the opening scene, set in the Baltimore, Maryland,  lodge of a private society called the Gun Club  just after the end of the Civil War (Verne, Euro-centrically, calls it the War of the Rebellion) and it is rife with the predictive programming of both technocrats and war profiteers in an eerie beckoning to the period in which the film is released.

In the film, the pivotal dialog is culled from the opening chapter account of the history of the Gun Club, and its present malaise in the aftermath of the conflict. As Verne reports:
As a young science-fiction buff, I grew up watching the Disney adaptation of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea on TV.  It was the 1960s, there were no VCRs or DVDs, no cable.  Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color (NBC, the home of the peacock—the first network to broadcast in color) was a window to these films released before I was born.  And one of them was that Verne underwater classic.  How I wish there were replay technology then, but I settled for finding a Classics Illustrated comic, and then a pulp version of the book. 
That movie left an indelible imprint and a hunger for both more Verne, and greater exploration of the sci-fi genre. It also began a long, strange journey into the archetypes of what I now see as a program of illuminist/technocratic indoctrination. With the ramp up to the era of the space programs:  satellites, orbiters, the “moon landing,” and the age of ubiquitous technology. In a single generation we saw the fantasies of the 1800s become reality!

Later, I discovered authors with similar themes and expanded glimpses into the realm of semiotics, allegory, and what we now loosely call predictive programming or futurism: Among many others, H.G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, then Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Philip K. Dick, and Ursula K. Le Guin. But I still always came back to Verne.
     During the War of the Rebellion, a new and influential club was established in the city of Baltimore in the State of Maryland. It is well known with what energy the taste for military matters became developed among that nation of ship-owners, shopkeepers, and mechanics.  Simple tradesmen jumped their counters to become extemporized captains, colonels, and generals, without having ever passed the School of Instruction at West Point; nevertheless; they quickly rivaled their compeers of the old continent, and, like them, carried off victories by dint of lavish expenditure in ammunition, money, and men.

     One day, however—sad and melancholy day!—peace was signed between the survivors of the war; the thunder of the guns gradually ceased, the mortars were silent, the howitzers were muzzled for an indefinite period, the cannon, with muzzles depressed, were returned into the arsenal, the shot were repiled, all bloody reminiscences were effaced; the cotton-plants grew luxuriantly in the well-manured fields, all mourning garments were laid aside, together with grief; and the Gun Club was relegated to profound inactivity (emphasis added).

Contained in these brief excerpts of Verne’s opening scene are the major themes which found resonance in post-World War II America to which the film was addressed: a period of (seeming) peace where the labors and attentions of the populace returned to daily life and the fortunes shifted from war production to the mundane. Where the once heroic and lucrative endeavors of the war industry seemingly found themselves in the margins of time and struggling to find purpose—and profits. 

Thus Verne then presents us with the solution to the dilemma and, with the words of Barbicane’s preamble, gives us the true nature of not only the practical issues at hand, but subtle clues to the Masonic-Illuminist agenda which marries the adventures of war to the stars:


There is no one among you, my brave colleagues, who has not seen the Moon, or, at least, heard speak of it. Don't be surprised if I am about to discourse to you regarding the Queen of the Night. It is perhaps reserved for us to become the Columbuses of this unknown world. Only enter into my plans, and second me with all your power, and I will lead you to its conquest, and its name shall be added to those of the thirty-six states which compose this Great Union.
Just as Verne’s fictional Barbicane is left to provide the solution to the fading fortunes of the militarists of the post-Civil War Gun Club, so, likewise, did the emergence of the U.S. space program signal a redirection of effort towards a more celestial nature.  Both the novel and the film predictively point toward an effort to move man and his military efforts out beyond the Earth realm of the profane.  A reinvention which has the same ends but employs a brilliant dialectic rife with ancient metaphors painted upon a broad canvas of Masonic and occult symbolism.
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Jules Verne’s Masonic Embeds
Excerpted from “The Occult Influences
In the Classics”- A Work-in-Progress
    By Randy Maugans
Pennsylvania

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INSIDE THE GRASSY KNOLL