Viral Video and Memetic Deconstruction

This video, ZEITGEIST (see www.zeitgeistmovie.com) is making heavy rounds on You Tube, blogs, and twitter.

I listened to this video while catching up on e-mail after being down and out for two days with the flu….from background I picked up this as the general tone of the film which goes back into history to try to tie 9/11 to government malfeasance. I would add it is important to deconstruct this video to determine what is the “viral shell” and what is the actual “memes” the creators are trying to release. Good question.

Half Historical Musings

From the audio I gathered there are a number of references, or parrallels with Christ (Christian), Horus (Egyptian), Dionysus (Greek), Mithra (Persian), etc, etc, and in short seems to make the conclusion that all of these dieties are tied together astrologically…old news or the video advances the concept of Armageddon as nothing more than the misinterpretation of an astrological metaphor and as part of an act of ongoing “transference”- and that Christ a product of Roman politics. None really shocking given much of the Greek books were written in koine Greek…let’s call it “lost in translation”. We really don’t know.

It also chalks up a certain cross (which looks like an extended Crux Ansata) to paganism. Again no shocker since the Sun God Tau could be seen as a fore runner of the cross- represented by a T.

Why not Throw in the Masons?

Personally I was wondering if they were going to sling in the “All Seeing Eye” (as on the US Dollar), a.k.a. The Eye of Providence, part of the symbolism Great Seal of the United States…also the words “annuit coeptis” which roughly means “it is favorable to our undertakings”.

It is positioned atop an unfinished pyramid where there are 13 steps representing the 13 states. It would be easy to chalk this all up to Masonic influence if one used Thomas Smith Webb’s, The Freemasons Monitor, published in 1797 where he wrote “although our thoughts, words and actions may be hidden from the eyes of man, yet the All-Seeing Eye, whom the Sun, Moon and Stars obey, and under whose watchful care even Comets perform their their stupendous revolutions, pervades the innermost recesses of the human hear and will reward us according to our merits.” It is never that simple and that is unlikely since there was active and strong anti-Masonic propoganda circulating at the time. The Masons did not appear to design the seal either (many of their symbols are borrowed from Christianity), more than likely it was a mistranslation from 1884’s Harvard scholar, Eliot Charles Norton who commented it was merely “a dull emblem of a Masonic fraternity”.

If you want to get all conspiracy theorish you could make a stretch and say Google emerged from the “G” often seen over the All Seeing Eye in Masonic literature (From Darkness to Light) where it is the “Great Architect”, and the The Eye of Providence, if any symbol, is a Christian one and one perhaps borrowed from the Egyptian Eye of Horus.*

No matter what your belief, and I am tolerant and respect all, I leave it to each individual to take their own meanings and find their own way into life- this is an important aspect of libery. Ruminating over it will not change it, and I am certainly not out to change people’s beliefs and refuse to chase shadows because I simply do not have enough information.

Video Shifts and Overtakes HTTP

Here is what I do find important:

According to a recent report VIDEO (e.g. P2PTV, IPTV, etc) has now taken over HTTP traffic, even P2P traffic as the most prevalent form of traffic online. History aside this is the shift we need to think about it. Source of media consumption really is shifting or has shifted, where we get our information is changing and it changes as it enters into our sphere…this is an important and critical paradigm shift. Web 2.0, User Generated Content, ability to give feedback, etc are having an effect..

Meme as Gene

It brings new thoughts about memetics (or revives older ones), meme fecundity, meme replication, etc. If anything I think our government, any government for that matter, should adopt micro-chunking as a way to get information into the organization. Twitter or micro-chunk among yourselves folks- information and ideas flow flaster. Response is quicker and more ideas can be chewed over. Intelligence is only as good as action though.

ADDENDUM

* Eye of Horus- I believe it was known as “indjat” or “wedjet” and this symbol represented the falcon-headed god Horus and the Sun God- Re. I also believe the eyes may have had some root in duality (moon/sun) representing balance between reason and intuition or light/dark. If you want to take it a step further you might read Thomas Mann’s, Death in Venice, and apply the Greek concepts of the Apollonian and Dionysian which could be a parrallel. Not quite the same…but interesting at any rate.

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