Tartarus: the Genius Loci, part 3

Recall that just across the river Mersey from Liverpool is the town of Birkenhead, the most progressive place in the world in the view of Frederick Law Olmsted, the genius of outdoor place, and Charles Loring Brace, the man who organized the slave labor placement of orphans.

Now, for me, the word progressive is not a positive one. I’ve done research for decades on how progressive thought and progressive policies have created several economic problems that have increased the divide between rich and poor rather than decreased it—things like the minimum wage, which causes the layoffs of the very employees it’s supposedly intended to help. Of course, the minimum wage law wasn’t just a stupid economic policy that backfired; the law was passed on purpose to target layoffs of black employees in the 1930s. This racist agenda has been well documented.

And one of the most “progressive” ideas ever was something called eugenics, a word we don’t even use anymore because it’s so negatively charged. Encyclopedia Brittanica tiptoes around the term to define it as politely as possible: “The term eugenics was coined in 1883 by British explorer and natural scientist Francis Galton, who, influenced by Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, advocated a system that would allow ‘the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable’.” Eugenics was, in effect, racism plus population control (rebranded as a “choice” that all progressive women should want to make) and it spawned Margaret Sanger’s Planned Parenthood. (That Sanger believed in eugenics is openly admitted on the Planned Parenthood website.)

Just in case you doubt how progressive these policies were, Michael Freeden, writing in The Historical Journal, explored the attraction eugenics held for progressives. The well-known progressives of the time were people like George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Winston Churchill (the face of World War II), and Churchill’s best friend, Frederick Edwin Smith, who was born in Birkenhead. He’s maybe less well known but was no less powerful. Smith was the Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain and became the 1st Earl of Birkenhead in 1922. Because of this, he’s actually referred to as “Birkenhead.”

In 1930, Birkenhead published a futurist book called, The World in 2030, in which he wrote this: “By regulating the choice of the ectogenetic parents of the next generation, the Cabinet of the future could breed a nation of industrious dullards… A further immediate consequence of ectogenesis would be a plea that society should be allowed to produce the human types it most needs, instead of being forced to absorb all the unsuitable types which happen to be born… Many of the arguments brought against slavery would be powerless in such a case; for the ectogenetic slave of the future would not feel his bonds.” (p. 15-16) This quote is eugenics on parade and Aldous Huxley would depict the idea just two years later in Brave New World.

In his book, Birkenhead was hoping that, in the future, eugenics could benefit from the technology of ectogenesis, which refers to the process of growing babies outside the body of a woman, for example, in a test tube and incubator.

At the end of the 19th century, incubators displaying infants were all the rage at world’s fairs. Sideshows like “The Child Hatchery”charged admission to see premature babies under the guise of generating “funding” for neonatal research. Dr. Martin Couney’s “Infantorium” was located on Coney Island, which sat not on the 37th parallel, but its inversion, the 73rd meridian.

But the fact that Couney was only posing as a doctor suggests that the ectogenetic technology of the day was less than noble, perhaps something more akin to what Birkenhead described in The World of 2030. It’s possible that the incubator craze decades earlier was more than simply about a technology to produce “dullards” or even ectogenetic slaves. It may have also been an attempt to mass produce soldiers by mass producing infants.

And this is where we see an unexpected connection between the Earl of Birkenhead’s promotion of ectogenesis, right next door to Liverpool, where the Beatles were born 20 years later, and with both towns sitting on the 53rd parallel. Those carnations on the Beatles’ tuxedoes at the end of the Magical Mystery Tour symbolize being made flesh, coming into being through birth.

The word carnation is also similar to the Gaelic word carn, meaning a “heap of stones,” and from which the Scottish word cairn derives. A cairn, like a barrow, is a monument, something we looked at in Part 1. Dictionary.com defines a cairn as a “memorial.” But a cairn only has the skeleton of a barrow monument. It lacks the soil covering it, the flesh of the barrow. So while a barrow is a monument to death, we might see the cairn, the dolmen, and even standing stones, as monuments to birth, the greatest of all portals into physical reality.

Many esoteric researchers, even today, describe dolmens and standing stone circles as portals in their own right. In a video collaboration, Michelle Gibson talks about Aleister Crowley, shown here on the Sgt. Pepper album cover, passing his infant son through a circular megalith at Mên-an-Tol in Cornwall, and there have been other legends of infants being passed through this stone, mostly for the purpose of healing.

Perhaps such megaliths are memorials meant for more than simply thinking about the dead, but of symbolically re-membering or recalling the dead back into the corpus of the living. Perhaps a cairn is a portal for incarnation, essentially re-populating the world through such portals, specific places marked by mounds, bounds, hills, ley lines, even coordinates—the genius loci—where we re-member the Earth through symbolic birth.

And at this point, I should probably apologize for sharing misinformation in this video. In fact, I must apologize for letting it go this long, because I had to fully explore the mainstream narrative, but the truth is that genius loci doesn’t really mean “the ‘spirit’ of place” (and this is why it pays to watch my videos to their conclusions). If we look at the etymology more critically, we find that the Latin word genio means to be born, from the root word beget. The genio loci of ancient Rome means, literally, a place of birth… a birthplace.

A genius is an act of creation, of incarnation. Its root, gen is found in others words like gene, genealogy and primogeniture. It’s the creation of a generation of children, the same process of sending new souls to incarnate on the earth that Plato describes in the Myth of Er. However, the child’s “genius” wasn’t an attendant, regulating divinity; it was the child’s birthplace, its birth location, the coordinates at which the child entered the earth grid. In astrology, the location of a person’s birth is important because, along with the time of birth, it determines the “ascendant” in the birth chart. According to Google AI, “Your birthplace’s latitude and longitude pinpoint the exact placement of planets in your birth chart’s 12 houses, which represent different areas of life.”

So all of this: the orphans and anarchists in the valleys or pits, the Roman arches of hills, the inability to inherit land, the legal fight over the name vs. the place of a corpus or corporation, the ley lines / bearings / and beating of the bounds, and the tours along the 37th and 53rd parallels have all been a recurring attempts to quietly recruit a new generation of infantry, defined by Google AI as, “the soldiers who fight on foot and are the main land combat force in the military” that capture and hold territory. They can’t inherit the land, but they can hold onto it for the warlord.

Google AI tells us that, “The term "infantry" comes from the Latin word infans, meaning “unable to speak” or “child.” In Renaissance Italy, infante referred to a "youth" or "foot soldier" too young or inexperienced for cavalry, leading to the military term infanteria, which entered English via French around the 14th century. Today, infantry refers to any soldiers who fight on foot, regardless of their age or experience.” As such, the military term “infantry” pertains to the youthful nature of the members in this company of soldiers. The military term “troop” (836) can mean to walk—travel on foot—but it’s also used to define a company or group of soldiers in war… not to mention a troop of boy or girl “scouts”: the grooming of children to enter war-like companies, earning pins and patches to display on brown and green uniforms, the colors of camouflage.

The link between a war victory and the foot even takes us back to Romeo and Juliet, as Romeo’s mother cautions him in Act I, Scene 1: “Thou shalt not stir a foot to seek a foe.”

War starts with the foot.

Jules Verne gives us similar imagery in the 21st chapter of The Children of Captain Grant: “Manuel could not conceive of any state but a military one, and he hoped in due time, with the help of God, to offer the republic a whole company of young soldiers. ‘You saw them. Charming! good soldiers are Jose, Juan, and Miquele! Pepe, seven year old; Pepe can handle a gun.’ Pepe, hearing himself complimented, brought his two little feet together, and presented arms with perfect grace.”

In light of the nature of a fighting “infantry,” the story of the pirate Blackbeard takes on possibly new meaning. According to Cort Lindahl, Blackbeard was hung along with twelve of his crewmates in 1719 at Williamsburg, Virginia. His skull was then raised on a pike at the entrance of Hampton Harbor, sitting exactly on the 37th parallel. Years later, this skull was said to have been silver plated and used as a punch bowl known as “the infant.” To turn the dome of a skull into a basin is to invert the hill into a valley, and is a symbolic move from the head to the foot. There are many ways to kill someone but the symbolism of separating body parts, especially the head, speaks to dismemberment as something even more powerful than death. (show slide of Perseus holding Medusa’s head again) The message of a story of dismemberment, like that of Osiris, is that it’s dangerous to become separated from the corpus, the body, the group.

That the infantry fights “on foot” is a symbol of militarism that goes back to Perseus, who founded the city of Tarsus in Turkey when an oracle told him to build a city where his foot first touched the ground after a victory in war. The resulting city of Tarsus is where the tarsal and meta-tarsal bones of the foot get their name. I was first made aware of the importance of Tarsus by my friend Dane Quirk,  Saturn Rooster on YouTube. He pointed out to me that Tarsus sits next to the city of Adana, a symbolic coupling of heaven and hell, with Tarsus being a name close to Tartarus and Adana similar to Eden. You’ll recall from Castaways that another Eden, this one in Australia, sits on the 37th parallel south, while this Eden, Adana in Turkey, is located on the 37th parallel north.

So maybe it’s time to return to Australia and the 37th parallel south to tie this whole story together.

As I’ve discussed elsewhere, remembrance is the metaphorical re-binding of a body held together with the fascia membrane: it’s a fascist, corporatist bond. Likewise, the word re-member, or recalling memories, is about re-populating or re-calling (calling back) the members of a group, especially groups that engage in combat. There are hints of this play on words everywhere. Going back to Jules Verne’s Floating Island, we find this one: “Were there any soldiers in Floating Island? Yes, a body of five hundred men under the orders of Colonel Stewart, for it had to be remembered that some parts of the Pacific are not always safe.” It’s saying one thing, but giving very specific imagery when the words are parsed: “a body of men… it had to be re-membered.”

In another video, I also discussed that the rhyme, “Remember, remember the Fifth of November,” is not only a line telling people to memorialize the Gunpowder Plot, but an instruction to re-populate the movement to carry it out. The people on Tour 37 in Nemesis are following a ley line or path that’s rising to the location of a memorial tower, a place for remembering the dead. And on the 37th parallel south, there’s another, very well-known place for remembering the dead killed in war. It’s called the Shrine of Remembrance.

This shrine occupies another position in Australia that’s been the subject of Dane Quirk’s research on his SaturnRooster YouTube channel. Its coordinates cause my work and Dane’s to overlap: the 144th meridian east and the 37th parallel south.

Dane has found alignments of recurring values between the Shrine, the municipality of Eden, the Parliament House pyramid in Canberra, and the lighthouse on Montague Island. For example, Dane noticed that the distance from the tip of the pyramid over Parliament House to the lighthouse on Montague Island was 144 km long. This is 144,000 meters, echoing the number of 144,000 white casing stones on the pyramid in Giza. And as mentioned before, the Shrine of Remembrance, also with a step pyramid over a Romanesque building, sits at the longitude of 144 degrees east.

Dane also realized that the alignment from Parliament House out to Montague Island passes right over a mountain called Mt. Moruya, as well as several large granite megaliths, 10 meters high. Recall that the name Montague means “pointed hill” and the name Capulet suggests a pyramid capstone. Moruya is also a pointed hill, and its name derives from an aboriginal word meaning “resting place of the black swans.” Dane believes this refers to a Viking ship in the shape of a swan that capsized there. You can find more information on this at his SaturnRooster YouTube channel.

What’s interesting in the overlap of our work is the prevalence of these masonic numbers, 37 and 53. In my research, I found that the numbers show up in modern travel distances, too: 553 kilometers from the Shrine of Remembrance to Eden, and 53.5 kilometers or 53 minutes Adana to Tarsus.

The Shrine of Remembrance is an Australian national war memorial, built in Melbourne on a 50-foot artificial hill. The memorial was dedicated in 1934, which happens to be 37 years before Nemesis was published, a novel that includes a Temple being killed on a monument on a hill. In my own research, I found that using the 37th line of latitude as a baseline, the alignment of the Shrine up to the Parliament House pyramid in Canberra is also 37 degrees. And from the 37th latitude, the Puckapunyal army base sits at a 53 degree angle from the alignment of the Shrine of Remembrance to Parliament House.

One of the statues at the Shrine of Remembrance is called Father and Son. According to the shrine’s website, the statue was “created to honour the courage and sacrifice of 2 generations of Victorians who served and died in the First and Second World Wars. It is symbolic of the service of many Victorian families, in which the father served in the First World War (1914-18) and the son in the Second World War (1939-45).” The implication is clear: for many sons in early 20th century Australia, it wasn’t land, but the legacy of serving in a war that was the inheritance they received from their fathers.

I would suggest that the Shrine of Remembrance, at 37 degrees south and 144 degrees east, was intentionally placed on these symbolic coordinates to create a very specific genius loci or birthplace for a concept: the perpetuation of war. It’s obvious that simply encouraging many minds to focus on war will perpetuate it, but the process goes much deeper than that. A memorial of remembrance is a form of recruitment that binds us with emotions of us vs. them, causing the old to grieve for friends lost to earlier wars, and solidifies the population’s resolve for continuing what feels like their own “principled” fight.

Of course, the Shrine of Remembrance didn’t yet exist when Jules Verne wrote his novel exploring the 37th parallel, but he was doing something similar in The Children of Captain Grant: using the symbolism of Eden—the symbolic birthplace of humanity—to glorify the corporate municipality, which is just another feature of the company, the group, the platoon, the business that dissolves individual accountability in large numbers. You might not convince boys to kill individually, but you can easily convince boys (and girls) to kill when they’re anonymized within a corporate body.

But in a podcast on the Shrine, Dale Holmes and his guest Nikki Penford describe these jagged, angular pits as “sperm / egg.” In fact, Nikki also explains that the model for the Shrine was called the “embryo.”

For me, this symbolism is about re-membering war through the act of birth.

When Dane first shared his alignments in this area, which you can see him talk about on his YouTube channel, SaturnRooster, I asked him if there was anything interesting at the mese point, the center, between Montague and what I see as “Capulet,” the capstone of Parliament House. When he measured it out, Dane found that what sat at the mese point of this alignment was a gigantic pit called the Big Hole. It’s a perfect metaphor, the Big Hole as a concave womb to house the offspring created by the incorporation of Montague and Capulet. This is birth symbolism—the in-carnation on the tuxedo the elites use to encourage recruitment through re-population, but its most important feature is that it’s ectogenetic: this womb isn’t inside Juliet. It’s outside her “body,” her corpus, at the mese between Juliet and Romeo… just like an incubator on Coney Island. Simply by providing the Capulet and Montague context, the controllers were turning the Big Hole into a genius loci, a symbolic place of birth.

And this isn’t the only genius loci to be found in this area. Another ancient “womb” is located here, known as Gulaga, with the modern name of Mt. Dromedary. To the Aboriginals, Gulaga symbolizes the mother and Dane found that the alignment between Montague Island and the Shrine of Remembrance (the sperm, the egg, the embryo) passes straight through Gulaga without any deviation. According to Wikipedia, Gulaga “holds particular significance for Aboriginal women. For the Yuin people it is seen as a place of cultural origin. The mountain is regarded as a symbolic mother-figure providing the basis for the people's spiritual identity.”

Gulaga is located on the 36th parallel south. The number 36 is not masonic; it’s harmonic. It’s a multiple of 9 and represents the 2nd octave of D, which is Harmonic 9. For the purpose of birth symbolism, the 36th latitude would have been a harmonic, healthy place to symbolize birth, though there’s no evidence that the Aboriginals acknowledged modern latitudes. But the controllers do acknowledge them, and they also distort harmonics, which is why the numbers in the masonic logo are 37 and 53, rather than 36 and 54. You can see that the interval they form is a distortion of the perfect 5th between D and A.

But the Aboriginals weren’t only focused on female birth symbolism. Gulaga was the mother of two sons, one of them being Barunguba, the land mass of Montague Island, which was also on the 36th parallel south. Dane learned from an elder that Montague Island was historically a place for young male initiation. And going back to Perseus, the demigod who founded Tarsus by placing his foot on that location,  Google AI tells us that the Perseus cult (which was the religion worshipping him) focused on specific male initiation rites: “These rituals involved tests or contests for young men to prove their worth and move toward full citizenship.” Google goes on to say that the process of adolescent male initiation generally involves fostering a new identity with a focus on “responsibility to the group.” A group can also be described as a company or a corporation. This is the same initiation rite the Shrine of Remembrance is attempting to conjure on the 37th parallel south: fostering an identity defined by a responsibility to the group and moving toward full citizenship: they want young men coming to the Shrine with their families to feel a strong call of duty—a remembrance—emanating from this genius loci.

Aboriginal women weren’t allowed on Barunguba (Montague Island), at least during these male initiations, and the females would instead congregate on Gulaga, as their genius loci. Likewise, when the Shrine of Remembrance first opened, women were not allowed into the building, despite the fact that many mothers and girlfriends had many “remembrances” of their lost loved ones. But the Shrine wasn’t really about the memories of lost soldiers in the hearts of their relatives. It was about the literal re-populating and re-binding of military companies as a male initiation rite.