By Vincent Bridges (02/20/03)
I first heard about the illuminati elves in the pages of Dr. John Lilly’s Center of the Cyclone, page 231 in fact. Lilly has the entertaining idea that the various contacts with higher, or just different, intelligences found in religion and occultism can be explained as contact with time travellers from the distant future who work as agents of what Lilly calls Cosmic Coincidence Control Center. These agents, “the elves,” create a network of synchronicity that acts as a thermostatic regulator on human consciousness and its evolution.
Here’s how Lilly puts it on page 231: “Such a network exists and functions‚ throughout this planet. I suspect it extends farther than our earth, but this has yet to be publicly demonstrated unequivocally beyond the private experience of myself and others.” Indeed, coming from the man the New York Times described as “a walking one-man syllabus of Western civilization” we might consider his comments as authoritative.
And the “elves” seem to have been at work on Lilly’s book as well, hence that page 231 synchronicity. This number of course can be turned into a date, January 23rd. Which is another 23, and a pointer toward Columbia’s, both as a faux goddess and as a space shuttle, moment of maximum danger. So what is so special about the number 23?
First off, it seems to be an intuitive trigger of some sort related directly to our DNA. We receive 23 chromosomes from each parent to create the embryo of what we will become, and within our DNA itself, there is an unexplained bonding irregularity, a sort of stutter in the code, every 23rd angstrom in a DNA chain. This is not news to the Kabbalist, who has already figured out that 23 is the numerical value of such Hebrew words as “parting, removal, separation,” “joy,” “a thread,” and “life,” all of which point to sexuality and DNA.
There is also that arcane piece of argot from the turn of the century – 19th to 20th that is – “23 skidoo” the origins of which are shrouded in mystery. Aleister Crowley, a supposed illuminati himself, entitled the 23rd chapter of his classic Book of Lies “23 skidoo” and revealed that the secret was “get out.” This has led some wags to speculate that the final secret of the Illuminati is that you don’t realize you are in until it is too late to GET OUT. 23 skidoo.
There are 23 axioms in Euclid’s geometry, and 23 percent of the universe is “dark matter.” In telegrapher’s code, 23 means “break the line,” while in the I Ching hexagram 23 is called Breaking Apart. I could go on and on, once you start looking for 23s you begin to find them everywhere. One of the best books in which to look for 23 synchronicities is Arthur Koestler’s Challenge of Chance. Perhaps the best way to think of it is as a symbol for what some physicists have called QUIP, or the quantum inseparability principle, a theory that holds that every particle affects every other particle in the universe.
And what of January 23rd? The calendar of the Catholic Church informs us that January 23rd is the wedding night of Mary and Joseph, a supposedly uneventful evening according to doctrine. But what if it wasn’t so uneventful? Nine months later would give us a birth date for Jesus of October 23rd coincidentally the date Columbia was unveiled for the public in 1862. This birth date also fits in well with the story of the Magi found in Mathew’s Gospel. It would certainly have taken them several months to travel from the Turkish highlands of central Asia to Palestine in time for the January 6th Epiphany.
To the early Church, the Feast of the Epiphany, which marked the arrival of the Magi, the marriage at Cana and the baptism of Jesus by John, and the appearance of another “dove,” was much more important than Jesus’ nativity. For some sections of the Christian community, such as the Cathars, the Epiphany was the most significant moment in the church calendar. Some obscure secret seemed to hide behind the juxtaposition of these three events, a secret that threatened to change the very concept of Christianity as taught by the official church.
There is no Biblical basis for a nativity feast and what Gospel evidence there is suggests Jesus was born in the late fall, as noted above. The early church had no traditions or celebrations of the nativity until the 3rd century, it didn’t become common until the 4th century and it wasn’t until the 5th century that it officially became December 25th, which was chosen for reasons of religious politics not any sense of spiritual or historical correctness. The act of saying a mass in honour of Jesus’ birth, hence Christ’s mass or Christmas, on the birthday of his most powerful pagan rival, Mithra, is plainly and simply an attempt to absorb and redirect the rival cult’s followers, in effect saying that Christ is more powerful than Mithra because he supersedes him. It also undercuts the importance of the Epiphany, including the Magi as an afterthought to the nativity instead of as the central focus of the story.
The calendar adjustment in the 18th century also helped confuse matters. Adding 11 days meant that Christmas was now January 5th and 12th Night, or the Feast of the Epiphany was now January 17th (and coincidentally, the date the Declaration of Independence was submitted for ratification by the Continental Congress). Most organizations within the church ignored the shift and celebrated the festivals on the same old days, but there were some who found this juxtaposition of the Epiphany and the traditional Feast of St Anthony, the saint already associated with January 17th very appealing. One of those groups was the Catharist neo-Templars of Johann Augustus Starck, Weishaupt’s initiator into the mysteries.
This has led in modern times to another group of Merry Pranksters, the so-called Priory of Sion, seizing upon this and various medieval mysteries such as the treasure of Gisors and Rennes-le-Chateau to make public the very secret connections most prized and carefully hidden by Starck’s Catharist Neo-Templars. A cottage industry has grown up around these matters, without anyone realizing its illuminationist sources. Key events in this mythos that happened on January 17th include the Satanist takeover of the Catholic Church in 1377, King Rene’s birthday in 1408 and Flamel’s successful transmutation in 1387, as well as various events in and around Rennes-le-Chateau.
Note that January 17th, the feast of St. Anthony and the New Style date of the Epiphany, is only five nights away from January 22nd/23rd, the eve of Joseph and Mary’s wedding night. In this one coincidence, we find a cluster of very revealing synchronistic clues. There is a sexual component in both the marriage at Cana and the Holy Couple’s wedding night, as well as John the Baptist’s acknowledgement of Jesus as his son during the Baptism. The visit of the Magi is a symbol of the larger spiritual current and a nod to the original illuminated ones. And tying it all together is the number five, which, as the union of the first masculine number, 2, and the first feminine number, 3, represents growth and sexuality in all its forms. In Tantric practices, 23 is the number of days in the male hormonal cycle, which is of course five less than the feminine cycle of 28 days.
That gives us an illuminated goddess of freedom purposefully tied into a complex of number synchronicities that suggests the true secret of illumination is somehow sexual, and both the secret and the illumination behind it are connected to an alternative view of Christianity. Columbia was first unveiled on 10/23/1862, which as I noted above is 10 + 23 = 33 and 1+8+6+2 = 17. Added together again they are 17 + 33 = 50; also 3 + 3 = 6 and 1 + 7 = 8, 8 + 6 = 14, and 1 + 4 =5. If we take the 23 from the date, then 10 goes into 50 five times. This gives us both our link to the masons, 33, and also 5, 17 and 23, our master numbers of the illuminati elves. The installation date, 12/2/1863 also yields the key numbers, 12 + 2 = 14, 1 + 8 + 6 + 3 = 18 and 1 + 8 = 9. Added together again, 14 + 9 = 23. (Also, 12 + 2 +1863 = 1877, which added together is also 23/5. The same can be done for 10/23/1862; 33 + 1862 = 1895, which adds across to 23/5.) Note that while both dates have prominent 5/23 connections, only the unveiling date has the hidden 17.
Before we get to that hidden 17, the starting point of this labyrinth of synchronicity, I must, in the interest of full disclosure, admit that since my birthday is 5/23/1952, I am sort of the Illuminati poster child in terms of the key numbers. I was informed of this at a pagan gathering several decades ago by a beautiful red-headed witch who took one look at the numerology of my birth date and wanted to know: Who I was kidding? First I say my name is Vincent Bridges, an obvious put-on, and then I give her a birthday that reeks of the illuminati; what am I, some kind of wise guy?
I explained that it was indeed both my real name and my real birthday, and she explained to me about the secret of 23, the five ages of Illuminated history and how everyone born in 1952 (1 + 9 + 5 + 2 = 17) had the hidden 17 that was the mark of the Discordians, a bunch of jokers who were apparently in a kind of time war with the forces of the Illuminati. If I wasn’t kidding her, then anytime anyone who was in the know heard my name and my birthday they would know that I was the one who would conquer the bridges between all the different factions of the Illuminati. Later, back at her tent, she asked if I was the reincarnation of Adam Weishaupt. To really mess with her mind, I replied: No, I’m the reincarnation of Aleister Crowley‚ 23 skidoo.
But to return to the hidden 17. Remember that Nostradamus spaced his two comet quatrains, II/46 and II/62, 17 quatrains apart, inclusive. And the one moment in the flight of the Columbia that could be completely planned, assuming the launch went off on time, was the moment of orbital insertion, just after midnight GMT on January 17th, 2003. The astrology of this moment matches, with eerie exactness and prophetic consequences, the moment of Columbia’s ceremonial installation on the Capitol Dome in 1863. Coincidence? Perhaps not.
When we take 1/17/2003 apart in the same manner as the other dates we find something truly curious. Not only is the year directly a 23, less the 0s in 2003, but 2 + 3 = 5, and 1 + 17 = 18, 5 + 18 = 23, or 2 + 3 = 5. Only years that add to five can change, or bridge, the 17 into a 23, such as 1904, 1 + 9 + 4 = 14 = 5. Also 1913, 1922, 1931, and 1940 add to five, as do 1967 and 1976, 1958 and 1985, and 1949 and 1994 as 23s, which then also reduces to a five. On each of these eleven years, January 17th transforms into a 23/5. Other years that add up to 17 are 1907, 1916, 1925, 1934, 1943, 1952, 1961, 1970, and on these eight years January 17th transforms into 17, or an eight as the sum of 1 + 7, the next number in the Fibbonacci series of 2, 3, 5, 8 which generates approximations of phi, the golden ratio.
In the Tarot, Trump number 17 is The Star, traditionally attributed to the Hebrew Letter Tsadi and the zodical symbol Aquarius, which makes it very appropriate for a goddess like Columbia, who after all has such a significant ascendant in Aquarius, and the space shuttle Columbia, dying as a flaming star in the month of Aquarius. Therefore, it is easy to see Nostradamus’ hidden 17 as a clear indicator of the Star, the comet of the shuttle Columbia, the star in the morning sky that heralds the coming Final Crusade with the Islamic world.
However, to understand that most closely guarded secret of the Justified Ancients of Mammu, the JAMs behind the Illuminati, we must turn to that quintessentially Victorian bad boy, Aleister Crowley. Get ready to kick out the JAMs before we all 23 skidoo.