Mind Meld 98 | Hidden Symbols and Esoteric Epiphanies with Freemason and Author, Robert W. Sullivan IV

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Author and 32nd degree Freemason Robert W. Sullivan enters the mind meld to decipher the occulted protocols of culture, media and the mind.   

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If you have an eye for it, it won’t surprise you when I say the streets of our cities are covered in arcane esoteric imagery. Actually, I was just in San Francisco, and sure there are a lot of hyper-modern sharp edges happening, but there are also a lot of older, odder esoterically-inscribed structures.

There was one building in particular I walked by almost every day on Post street. The front door to it is surrounded in about a dozen Hermetic reliefs. The one that continuously drew my eye depicted a man holding a caduceus, the winged staff of Hermes. The man is kneeling, staring at some sort of glass alchemical looking vessel like he’s waiting for something to happen.

I kept thinking to myself- How is it that people aren’t stopping and wondering what the shit the significance of this is on a daily basis?

Of course this phenomenon is absolutely not unique to San Francisco or even architecture in general. In a lot of ways, the whole symbol system of our culture is like psychic rubble from an omnidirectional cultural collision of myth, archetypes symbols and numbers. Even our media and our minds are blanketed in it, deeper than we can even fathom.

Who knows why we continually push certain symbol structures. I’m certainly stimulated by the notion that it could all be emanating from some sort of collective unconscious.

At first, that may sound ludicrous, (probably not if you’re a regular listener) but if it does sound far-fetched, I ask you this- Why is it then that these narratives persist? Why, for example, are we so compelled to keep telling stories that embody the archetypical hero’s journey? Why is it that we keep telling tales of death, resurrection and redemption?

These questions are open-ended of course and with that, I think all of that dovetails nicely into the  rhetorical territory this mind meld with Robert W. Sullivan explores.

Musings in this mind meld –

• An overview of the imagery and themes in Freemasonry
• Different Freemasonic lodges and degrees of freemasonry
• Many of the systems that govern society are descended from esoteric symbolism and Freemasonry
• Simon Greenleaf, DeWitt Clinton 
• Combinan Illuminati?
• Key myth cycles that keep repeating in our stories
• Columbia, Minerva, Isis and the sacred feminine
• What it’s like to enter a Freemasonic lodge
• From fool to resurrection and apotheosis- carrying that awakening into society
• How gnostic narratives and archetypes have seeped into mass media. Is it on purpose?
• Why is Hermes/Mercury and the caduceus everywhere
• Specific examples esoteric weirdness in films
• Historical prognostication, the era of cathedrals and the temple of Zerubbabel