Pop Occulture: Can we talk about The Fountain?
Darren Aronofsky's meditation on death hits pretty hard.
Thereโs a scene toward the end of Darren Aronofsky's movie, The Fountain, that caused me to pause the movie after audibly gasping and refer to a symbol that I drew and remain obsessed with from some five years ago. I was meditating on lunch break one day and I had my journal open on the table in front of me. I had one of those recordings that the Voyager probes made of the electromagnetic noise that the rings of Saturn make and at the peak of this experience I was hit by one of my first truly mystical experiences as a result of deliberate intent. I received a vision of a circle which contained a smaller circle at its bottom with an arrow pointing upward inside of the smaller circle. Above the smaller circle was a larger circle emerging from the boundary of the container. I drew it in my journal and it became known to me as the Astarte Sigil, a symbol that I would one day understand was a sort of signature of mine on the astral. One day, when Iโm not poor, Iโll get that tattooed on me.
Iโm about to spoil the end of The Fountain, by the way. Youโve had fifteen years to see it and youโve seen the gif anyway. So deal with it. But when Jackmanโs ascetic monk character finally comes to grips with the eventuality of death and its cosmic role in the creation process, he suddenly climbs the dying tree that heโs been ritually preserving for God knows how long. Itโs a fairly blunt metaphor for climbing the Tree of Life. He reaches the top, which can likely be attributed to the Sephirah Tipareth, the Kabbalistic last stop on the tree before you face the abyss. Itโs here that all the sun gods place themselves upon the cross and go willingly to death in order to gain the wisdom they need to take the next step up the tree.
This progression of events gave me some insight into this symbol that Iโve been drawing everywhere and meditating on for literally years. The origin of the sigil came from a period where I was planning this elaborate working to plunge my community into a city-wide haunting and UFO flap. I always considered it to be some symbol of my ambition to reach an alien consciousness. But now having seen The Fountain, it occurs to me that this sigil, and maybe even that ambition, was really a signifier of my desire to rise up, break through, and break out of the loop for good. The movieโs protagonist(s) all struggle against death. They beat their heads against the wall. They fight a losing battle at the expense of so much in their lives. Each one, real or fictional struggles with this and by this suggestion, goes around and around the wheel of Samsara, stuck in this prison until the embrace the truth of death. Death isnโt something that I think about often, but when I do, I find myself quite at ease with it. One day, my time will come, and I actually kind of look forward to that day. Spending so much time meditating on the principles of Hermeticism has taught me that itโs not the end and that something lies beyond it but only if your heart is lighter than a feather. Though, thatโs another post, I suppose.
He then assumes the asana position and rises out of the bubble and crosses the abyss, toward the pleroma, reaching Kether and possibly joining the Ain Soph Aur where literally all life in the universe begins anew. Itโs fucking nuts, I tell you; incredibly beautiful special effects. They approach 2001 levels of awesome as Bowman enters the star gate.
But what struck me so hard about this scene โ to the point that I had to stop and collect my thoughts โ was the actual ascension. It presents itself with all the symbolism contained in my Astarte Sigil. A small dot contained in a bubble relates to Jackmanโs character, trapped in this gnostic prison of life. The head of The Inquisition actually notes this earlier in the movie, noting that death is the way in which we free ourselves. Now, in the context of the film, this is a menacing scene. The Grand Inquisitor is introduced mid-mortification. Heโs not portrayed without the typically baroque representations of Catholicism in Dark Ages Spain and itโs some real ugly business. In the movie, Jackman is a slave to his loathing of death and every incarnation of himself clings to the false hope that he can one day overcome its inevitability because to succumb to it means losing his wife. Itโs painful shit. The grief is very believable. Even the strongest people in the world will crumble under its weight.
He breaks out of the bubble and rises to the pleroma once he becomes enlightened about the nature of death, which is what my sigil has always suggested to me. Well, sort of. Iโm not terribly obsessed with death but the arrow points up. Iโm the dot. Iโm contained. Iโm trying to reach the greater sphere.
Iโm not a huge Aronofsky fan. I like it when he gets mystical. Everything else I could take or leave. But I recently re-watched Pi since the first time I saw it when it came out in all itโs high-contrast nightmare glory. I knew that it dealt with Jewish mysticism but what I had forgotten was that the first words spoken in the script are that magic number thatโs been following me around for most of my life: 913. Max utters the number as though heโs noting something that he did at 9:13am and I went nuts. Darren totally did that on purpose. The movie is all about the Shem and Gematria, so he must have meant to put that number right there at the beginning.
913 = ืึฐึผืจึตืืฉึดืืืช
It means In The Beginning and is the first word of the Torah. Personally, I think Iโve deduced that the number is a signal to me to get to work. I have a bad habit of practicing magic in fits and starts. I get into a groove and go hard for a couple months and then something happens to break the rhythm and months go by before I so much as perform the LBRP.
Iโm a sucker for a movie that even so much dips a toe in the mystical but does it in earnest. Encoding philosophy in the imagery of film gives a movie an extra dimension for me and I often wonder, much in the same way that I did about encoding gnosticism in Mage: The Ascension, if the mere presence of these concepts in the media has a subliminal effect on the viewer. Some minds are more open than others and I have to travel back in time and wonder about the person that I was before the first time I used LSD. Had I not done that would I be so receptive to these ideas? Had I never used any psychedelic, really? There seems to be a connection between the two. Like use of one of them, particularly psilocybin and DMT, and it unmoors us a bit from the illusion. Is it at all possible that people who, like myself in my teens, used psychedelic drugs are more likely to be affected or initiated into the mysteries by subliminal suggestions of a movie like The Fountain?