Six months after proposing some changes to this site, god of the Underworld — that would be Pluto — kicked in the door, grabbed my hair and hissed, “What do you want?” I sighed, then replied, “To make the Unknown Known.” He released his grip, sat down and texted for a bottle of Black Bowmore 42 Year Old single malt. Theatrical fellow.
Months ago I stumbled unexpectedly in to the saloon of fellow Substacker, Mr. Quick who writes Swimming Downstream From the Culture Pool. His article, What the Hell is Wrong with California? examined California's cultural presence on the global stage, harkening back to when San Francisco was a clean and respected business district; oil fields, orchards and vineyards flourished; people had health, wealth and happiness and culture thrived like a modern seaside Italian Florence under the Medici family.
As often happens in research, harmonic 1960’s folk-pop song California Dreamin’ threw up a surprise. To my ear, the lyrics had always said: Stopped in to a church, I passed along the way, Well I got down on my knees, And I began to pray. But no, the singer didn’t begin to pray, he pretended to pray. This felt like a side-swipe after all those years. How many songs were there in worship to Cali? The sub-categories are a rabbit warren; it wasn’t just songs, but films, books, regions, ships, cars, even outer space.
The Beach Boys famous “hymn to youth”, California Girls, was global by design. In 2018 one of its two lyricists, Mike Love, admitted, “Some people misunderstood and thought we were saying that California girls were best, but California is a microcosm of the US, which is the microcosm of the world, and we were trying to be inclusive.” -Wiki
Similarly, Mr. Quick wrote, “By any measure, California is a large enough tail to wag the national dog in many different scenarios, but […] California’s single biggest export is culture, and it does so first on a national basis, and then on a global basis.”
Mr. Quick continued: “Rather than achieving success via hard work and persistence, being “discovered” [in Hollywood, California] by the right person fuelled another wave of immigrants to the Golden State. Why bother with hard work when you can just look pretty? Kiss that protestant work ethic bye-bye and work on your smile. […]
For decades, the two biggest exporters of American food and fashion to the world were McDonald’s and Levi Strauss. […] In the 1970s, California began its transition from the political and ideological right to its current state of almost Stalinist hard leftism. California led the way to the left, as it still does today.” -Mr. Bill Quick
California was for many decades the world’s cultural blueprint; today it’s undergoing controlled demolition. Was cultural destruction inherent in the design’s “spell”?
As teenagers far removed from America — or so we thought in our small and English-cultured capital city — tv shows like “Beverly Hills 90210” and books by Francine Pascale described two Californian possibilities that every girl desired: either work hard to have a career, or work hard on hair and make-up. All that could be intuited for certain was that something was missing, and California seemed to promise it.
Around 16yrs old, my girlfriends & I used to borrow a parents car on summer evenings and would thrash Red Hot Chilli Peppers all the way to the beach and back. We’d ‘blade for hours; Californian surfer rock epitomised teen exuberance in our quiet capital city.
This was the way things were until, perhaps by design, the wheels blew spectacularly off that reality in 1995. Pluto — at that time a beast — took me to the Underworld where I remained for a heavy, but eventually enlightening, fifteen year period.
Pluto, from Greek Ploutus (wealth) was a Roman god of death and wealth, considered ruthless, inflexible, fearsome, terrible… and conversely — one of the fairest gods. He judged all souls regardless of race or social position, and he’s just entered the spirit of our dawning post-modern age of Aquarius*. So… What about California’s global spell?
*In more accurate dates of sidereal astrology, Pluto approaches structural Capricorn.
“The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.”
—Philip K. Dick
Latin’s fornax means furnace, defined as an enclosed structure in which material can be heated to very high temperatures — metals for example. Smelting metals happens to be an alchemical art. In Italian, forno (m) means oven. Fornia could also mean provide or form. Was Cali’s oven, form, her providence or even her furnace the spell for a global alchemical operation? California = Cali’s furnace? Who or what is Cali or Kali?
“Kali is associated not only with death but also with sexuality, violence, and, paradoxically, motherly love, and [she] is most often characterised as black or blue, partially or completely naked, with a long lolling tongue.” -Britannica.com
Cali or Kali is the goddess of speech, thus her prominent tongue in iconography.
In Shakta philosophy Kali is “blackness, night, the power of time, the embodiment of all fear, while she herself is beyond fear and protects those from fear who invoke her.”
In Theravada, Kali is a servant who tests her mistress, uncovering her true character.
From the Red Zambala; “Kali stands upon the corpse of the destroyed universe, the lifeless body is the symbol of whatever is left of the manifested universe when it reverts to the natural state of eternal time. […] The four arms of Kali represent the four directions of space identified with the complete cycle of time […]. It mocks those who, in the folly of their vanity, hope to escape dissolution.” -Wisdomlib
In Ayurvedic toxicology, Kali refers to one of the four fangs of a snake.
Kali is like a cosmic sting operation; this is goddess Kali’s Age, a potential furnace of destruction and rebirth. Pluto, too, will kick in the door to take down perpetrators, uncovering, uprooting and composting anything that fails to grow straight, scowling and sipping his £37,000 bottle of Black Bowmori scotch like a boss while he does so.
Gods (not God) and goddesses were — and are — energies, electromagnetic bodies moving through ether or plasma; together they form angles, oppositions, alliances; they love, divorce, abduct and have their nether regions chopped off; their properties were anthropomorphised to describe their energetic characteristics on us.
The way in which words are used in film, song, advertisements, names etc. are spells in the local medium. Planets or gods at vast distances have similar effects; some call their influence music of the spheres; ultimately the difference could be said to be scale.
Understanding these good vibrations makes navigating our place in our scaled-up Californian dumpster-fire-world easier while awaiting the inevitable Phoenix.
"Six months after proposing some changes to this site, god of the Underworld — that would be Pluto — kicked in the door, grabbed my hair and hissed, “What do you want?” I sighed, then replied, “To make the Unknown Known.” He released his grip, sat down and texted for a bottle of Black Bowmore 42 Year Old single malt. Theatrical fellow."
ROFL LMAO,. You had me at "Hello."
All the world is an illusion and the Universe is a dream….the only question is, why is ‘this’ what we are dreaming?
Perhaps the dream is the great escape, from an imagined horror that was only Love after all