“From the Profane to the Sacred”
Jules Verne’s Masonic Embeds - Excerpted from “The Occult Influences In the Classics”-A Work-in-Progress
By Randy Maugans
{This article was originally published in the Spring 2009 E-Zine, “Inside The Grassy Knoll”, and is republished here with additional graphics)
As a young sci-fi buff, I grew up watching the Disney adaptation of Jules Verne’s “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” on TV. It was the 1960’s, 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 1800’s become reality!
Later, I discovered other authors with similar themes and expanded glimpses into the realm of semiotics, allegory, and what we now loosely call “predictive programming” or futurism.
Certainly, H.G. Wells and Ray Bradbury ; then Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Philip K. Dick, and Ursula K. Le Guin, among many others. But it still always came back to Verne…
Recently I had a reminder of the old Verne era when Turner Family Classics was running a full day of sci-fi films. Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (a top ten favorite movie: seen it a dozen times) had concluded and then up rolls Jules Verne’s “From the Earth To the Moon” from 1958—-a Verne 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—and 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 1 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, Maryland1 lodge of a private society called the “Gun Club2” 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 accountof the history of the Gun Club, and its present malaise in the aftermath of the conflict. As Verne reports:
“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 havingever 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.”– The Gun Club-Chapter 1 of “From The Earth to the Moon”.(Emphasis added)
Contained in these brief excerpts of Verne’s opening scene are the major themes which found resonance in the 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.” -President Barbicane’s Communication- Chapter 2 of “From The Earth to the Moon”.
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 symbolisms.
Imagery of the Supernatural
Jack Parsons, founder of Jet Propulsion Laboratories
Many researchers have found striking imagery in the history of NASA, and even slightly pre-dating it— back to the halcyon days of Jet Propulsion Laboratories founder, Jack Whiteside Parsons and his adventures in high occultism with the infamous “Babalon Working”3 rituals at Pasadena and Mount Palomar (both locations considered to be occultically strategic and located just above the 33rd parallel). Verne is far more subtle, but intones the appellation, “Queen of the Night”, in homage to the famous aria from Mozart’s Masonic opera, “The Magic Flute”. Likewise, he invokes the personage of Columbus —a name evocative of the Masonic columns of Boaz and Joachim—and a term enshrined in the book’s 16th chapter, “Columbiad” to depict the cannon from which his craft would escape Earth. The term also inflects the future shuttle craft which would meet its fiery doom at the 33rd parallel in 2003—The Columbia—in a decidedly creepy series of synchronicities.
The dialectic of Barbicane’s speech, appealing to both nationalist expansion and the primal urges of conquest, are not dissimilar to the hubris which found its calling in the formative
years of NASA. The same themes would be pronounced in 1962 by President John F. Kennedy in his speech at Rice University in Texas (again, on the 33rd parallel), where he tasked the nation to a moon landing :
“We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on
man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence
can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war.”
Where Barbicane employs the imagery of Columbus, the great explorer of the seas, Kennedy sets a metaphor of space as a “sea”, arousing the same emotional bravado employed by Verne in beckoning to travel to the moon. Prophetically, Kennedy paraphrases the name of the very place where his own “new Columbuses” would step: The Sea of Tranquility (which sired
the infamous Tranquility Lodge No. 2000 in Waco, TX—on, you guessed it: the 33rd parallel). The sea plays enormous symbolic importance in the imagery of Verne, a man who not only coveted sea travel, but gave to his alpha male leading man, Nemo, a snippet of monologue which serves a philosophical pretext:
“ The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence. It is nothing but love and emotion; it is the ‘Living Infinite,’ “-Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea , chapter 10
The sea and the moon represent the supernatural aspects of existence: the realm of escape and the mysteries of something infinite beyond the common, the profane—earth. Space, the heavens, was the infinite backdrop and the navigational means by which man—the elevated, illumined man, transcended the gravity of the earthly realm. By extension, both the sea and space represented, in the mind of Jules Verne, nothing less than his “living infinite.”
Viewed as a whole, Verne’s work could well be examined as a broad allegory containing the four mystical elements of air, fire, earth, and water—the esoteric/alchemical journey through
matter and energy also seen in the “journey” of Freemasonry; the transcendence of the “profane” to the sacred. Indeed, it is in the characterization of Nemo (“the one”), that this embodiment is most concretized, as Nemo seeks even to command the sun:
“Adieu, sun! Disappear, thou radiant orb! rest beneath this open sea,
and let a night of six months spread its shadows over my new domains!”-
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea , chapter 14
Verne’s representations in words alluded to physical transcendence as a means to attain a spiritual realm. One which casts off limitations, breaks away from the gravity—the
earthbound— in the best spirit of Kant’s transcendent idealism. One of the discernable themes in the work of Verne was his disdain for the static, the landlocked, and the limited. He embraced the notion of the “Great Work” as a life measure:
“The desire to perform a work which will endure, which will survive him, is the origin of man’s superiority over all other living creatures here below. It is this which has established his dominion, and this it is which justifies it, over all the world.”-The Mysterious Island, Ch. 57
The Iconic Symbols of Verne
Verne’s subtleties in expression of words found their complements in the iconic symbols which graced his works and, in this, Verne was very exacting: sending artwork back for endless revisions and often requiring the intervention of his publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel. Modern readers, especially of the English versions, of Verne’s work may not know that the original works were copiously illustrated by the house artists of Hetzel’s publishing firm. The Hetzels 4(father and son, Louis-Jules) were forerunners of the modern day publishing practice of “content re-purposing” 5, often repackaging Verne’s works in as many as three different formats, some being nearly equivalent to the modern day “graphic novels”, and often offered with shorter works in a serialized anthology format.
While much of the inner graphics of the Verne editions have been lost, many of the covers which graced the “Collection Hetzel” books are still in evidence and it is obvious that no expense was spared as the Hetzel capitalized on the markets for Christmas and New Years with gold-leaf color binding in “grand octavo” (large format) editions which recombined both the two new (and contractually required) works of Verne with shorter works.6 It is from among these editions that we glean some of the iconic signatures of Freemasonry. Researcher/author, Philip Gardiner7 certainly makes the case for Verne’s, as well as the Hetzel’s , involvement in extolling the Masonic virtues 8through the allegories resplendent in the sum of Verne’s written legacy. The covers reveal Masonic symbolism, both obvious and subliminal, and truly qualify as “persistent iconology” —and iconology which migrated into the modern era in remarkable symmetry. That Verne’s books appear to be absent any sexual connotations is largely the emblem of the era of Victorianism in which he lived.
Verne’s sublimated animus leaned toward the Masonic ideal of a more universal procreation as evidenced by the cover of “From the Earth to the Moon” (Figure 1), which bears the imagery of a phallic projectile (the masculine) launched toward the “queen of the night”—the female orb.
In abstract (Figure 2) the projectile also portrays the Masonic compass
and square symbol with its diagonal juxtaposition to the title —another representation of the procreative elements of Freemasonry and an epigraph of the tantric merging of the male-female energies expressed in the new age hermaphroditic ideal.
This same iconic imagery reemerges in the logotype of NASA in 1958 (Figure 3). It requires little imagination to see the same abstraction in the rendering of the Masonic compass by that strange red glyph-like element.
A consistent symbolism emerges from, not just the cited Verne usage of the phallus- rocket (recall the earlier reference to the to the “columbiad”, a cylindrical projectile used prominently by Verne in “From the Earth to the Moon”), but is an archetype of ancient origin. It is best seen it the common obelisks which dot the landscapes of the globe and are
part of the lore of Tammuz and the cult of Semiramis9, also found in the three Masonic monuments in London, Paris, and New York called “Cleopatra’s Needle”.
Were the symbolism of the cover of “From the Earth to the Moon” left to stand alone we would be accused of projection, but examples abound and we need to examine a few more to get the pattern. Herewith, the cover of
a Hetzel “grand octavo” edition of “The Mighty Orinoco” (Le Superbe Orénoque)(Figure 4).
The “devil”, so to speak, is in the details of this ornate graphic which is rich in symbolism beyond the scope of this present writing. A close-up of the lower right corner (Figure 5-highlighted detail) reveals
yet another Masonic compass and square, embedded in the graphic ornamen-tation. Note also the triangle formed by the chain/title plaque and inverted compass from the top of the sphere.
Another of the examplse is the cover of another edition of “Extraordinary Voyages/The Magnificent Orinoco” (Figure 6). The symbolism here is less overt but its motif —dividedinto four horizontal segments— reveals, again, essential Verne themes in the panels of air, fire, earth,
and water with the title in a fan-shaped cartouche10. The lower one fourth imparts a nautical theme “anchored” by a stylized navigator’s compass formed with a distinct caduceus 11 (Figure 7). The snake/rope is the unifying thread and forms a continuum which terminates with the serpent head at the bottomcenter .
The graphics portray dualistic12 imagery in the execution—a technique which is very deliberate in intent and subliminal in its presentation. The form of the montage has numerous Hermetic and Cabbalistic overtones in its rendering.
Closing the Loop
The 1958 film, “From the Earth to the Moon” was a cinematic disappointment following on the heels of two superb productions: Disney ‘s 1954 “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” and MGM’s lavish 1956 adaptation of “Around the World in 80 Days”. In fact, it was the last movie produced by then bankrupt RKO studios —at one time controlled by eccentric industrialist
Howard Hughes.
The film wound up being distributed by Warners. It is now little more than a footnote in film history but serves as bookmark to a period of transition in the American focus.
For me it was a reminder to look more closely at Jules Verne and examine the body of work from a perspective I did not have forty years ago. We assign nobility to certain artists and forget that the seeds of dissimulation have been sown for many thousands of years into the cultural arc. Beloved though Verne may be, we now may examine the roots of his influences more carefully and see the patterns of cultural programming which course through the generations, certainly since the days of Francis Bacon and John Dees’ Rosicrucian designs.
Verne’s expressions of a technocratic world-view are woven into the subtexts of many of his works. The evidence presented in this work are threads for further examination. It would
be difficult to ignore the most obvious parallels to the fictional work and the fulfillments:
The story bears similarities to thereal-life Apollo program:
- Verne’s cannon was named the Columbiad; the Apollo 11 command module was named Columbia.
- The spacecraft crew consisted of three persons in each case.
- The physical dimensions of the projectile are very close to the dimensions of the Apollo CSM.
- Verne’s voyage blasted off from Florida, as did all Apollo missions. (Verne correctly states in the book that objects launch into space most easily if they are
launched from the earth’s equator. In the book Florida and Texas compete
for the launch, with Florida winning.)
Verne’s Masonic-Technocratic visions are still affirmed by the adoption of his works by Disney, whose founder, Walt Disney was a 33rd degree Mason complicit in presenting occult material to the children of the last two generations. Disney has produced many works from the Verne catalog and continues to hold Verne as a “touchstone” into the new century.
It would appear the mask has been ripped off the beloved authors of yesteryears as films like the “National Treasure” series and “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen”, openly portrays Masonic influences against a backdrop of adventure and heroism. Such films are not the “revelation of the method”, but another layer of obfuscation that distorts the mystical darkness which has guided most of humankind for thousands of years. The genuine understanding comes when we start to read the symbolisms embedded in the hallowed works of the classics and see what they really communicate.
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