The Tao of Masonry

We listen to all sorts of music in my house, and the radio stations will often flip from “classic” rock, to 80s/90s alternative, to current pop, to NPR, and even AM talk radio. So, last year when Lady Gaga was the new, hot thing over the pop airwaves, I really got to enjoy listening to her witty lyrical takes on the New York club scene, and the music business.

Okay, let’s stop here. For those of you readers who have not heard of Lady Gaga, it’s time to unplug your AOL dial-up connection, order some broadband, and spend some time on Youtube.

Oh, and welcome to the 21st century.

Yes, the millennium finally ticked over a few years ago, and trust me:  it’s perfectly okay to put away your Lynyrd Skynyrd 8-tracks, your colored vinyl 33s of Sha-Na-Na, your bootleg cassette tapes of Grateful Dead concerts, and that Led Zepplin Stairway EP, at least for a little bit, and listen to some of the new music that has been made since the Beatles.  Nobody will judge you, and you might even find something interesting.

Anyhow, the other day I was idly skimming some humor website, when I ran across a post claiming that Lady Gaga was the latest example of how “they” (the Masonic-Illuminati-NWO konspiracy) was using the entertainment media in an attempt to control our minds. The post linked to an article on a particular blog which promises hours of entertaining reading.

Yeah, I know. Y’all think I’m kidding.

Back when I started this blog — going on four years, which makes it a teenager in blog years — I wrote a parody of the type of thinking that we typically encounter when Anti-Masons talk about the various flavors of Masonic conspiracies. And over the last few years I’ve written a few more articles based on the conversations that I’ve had with the Antis in real life and on various web boards. And yes, I get a few blog comments, and a few people catch me at a lodge meeting to chuckle over a recent post, but I know that most of you simply don’t take any of this seriously. I mean, it’s stupid — how could anybody take this stuff seriously, right?

Some of you would be surprised — nay, astounded  — at how often Masons are implicated in plots ranging from Zionism to the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks to NASA (and the secret bases on the Moon) to UFO & alien technology, to fixing the parking tickets for local politicians. Whew, we’re really busy bees, aren’t we? But naturally, all of those conspiracy theories are completely ridiculous. I mean, alien technology? Moon bases? Hah, don’t be ridiculous.

No, the real Masonic conspiracy is how we control the electronic media and how we manipulate the entertainment industry in order to engage in our mind control experiments.

Yes, that’s right: the  people who believe that Masons are using Hollywood to engage in mind control actually believe that they are smart ones.

And that brings me to my case in point: the meteoric rise to fame of  Lady Gaga. Her videos are supposedly filled with Masonic/Illuminati symbols, which prove the efforts of the Masonic controlled entertainment media to warp the mind of our youth.

This is the contention of The Vigilant Citizen (“Symbols rule the world, not words nor laws”) in a series of articles that he has done over the last year. Here’s an example:

My first article on Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta called “Lady Gaga, the Illuminati Puppet“ generated a great deal of interest and controversy. It got featured on many websites and I was deemed either a “genius” or “batshit crazy” depending on the point of view. I can confirm that I’m neither of those two things and that I’m just a guy who knows his symbolism. Many news sites and blogs linked to my article by deforming its original intent (probably for more sensationalism) by adding sarcastic remarks like “Oh No Lady Gaga Wants to Control our Minds!” or “The Crazy Lady Gaga Conspiracy“. I guess those reactions were to be expected. To people who are not acquainted with obscure concepts such as Monarch programming and occult symbolism, the whole thing might sound totally far fetched and ridiculous. But to those who have background knowledge and who have researched these topics (a small minority), I was simply stating the obvious.

Since this article, Gaga has released more material re-using  exactly the same  themes as were discussed in the first article: mind control and secret society occultism. I have to hand it to Gaga, she knows how to generate buzz and controversy around her persona and keep people guessing. The great majority of people still have no idea what her symbolism refers to. So, at the risk of being called “batshit crazy” again here’s Lady Gaga’s latest occult pictures.

Most of Mr. Vigilant’s contentions are based on MK Ultra mind control conspiracies. In case you have any doubts about the breadth of these attempts, he points out:

During their reeducation, subjects are said to be exposed to numerous symbols such as trees, spider webs, masks, mazes, butterflies, etc. They are also shown movies which contain specific symbols (or “triggers”) such as The Wizard of Oz and many Disney Movies. The same way those subjects are brainwashed and reeducated, mass media conducts a large scale mind control project, which starts at birth with Disney movies and continues with Hollywood flicks and music videos.

Yeah, I know. Conjecture and assumptions. But Mr. Vigilant drives home the point in this article:

In my articles on Lady Gaga and the 2009 VMAs, I’ve identified the use and display of elements taken from Masonic symbolism. If my previous claims were considered inconclusive or “grasping at straws” by some, I wonder if they’ll remain skeptical of the presence of Masonic symbolism in pop culture after seeing this  set of photos, taken INSIDE A MASONIC LODGE,

If you have minimal knowledge of Freemasonry, you already know the great importance of the twin pillars Jachim and Boaz. They are depicted in a great number of Masonic works of art, such as this one.

Gaga is standing between both pillars, wearing Hello Kitty shoes, occultly referring to mind control programming (innocence, childhood, re-education, etc). Her eyes are closed but she has wide-open eyes painted on her eyelids, which is very symbolic: her eyes seem open but they are still wide shut.

In the picture above, Gaga is sitting on a Masonic throne, complete with the twin pillars on each side of her.

Above her head is the compass of Freemasonry:

She is wearing a Hello Kitty dress and posing in a very mannequin-like stance. Her hands are positioned in way reminiscent of iconic art which displays the hermetic maxim “as above so below”.

In the  picture above, Gaga is standing next to the bust of an important Mason (easily recognizable by the collar). The “one eye” symbolism discussed in the previous article is still an intricate part of Gaga’s imagery. She is however far from being the only artist doing this (see Rihanna’s R Rated album cover). Hello Kitty is covering Gaga’s…kitty in another odd juxtaposition of Masonic symbolism with mind control, often found in entertainment photo shoots.

Wow. Just… just, wow.

Over the last year, I’ve used Youtube to watch a few of her music videos (You know, it’s too bad that there’s not some TV channel that’s devoted solely to playing music videos, in the way that radio stations play tunes. Somebody would make a fortune if they could implement that idea.), and personally I’ve been struck by how detailed they are, and how she makes excellent use of imagery ranging from modern to classical. But is she streaming symbolic Illuminati messages to the masses, or is she just a clever mash-up artist?

In my opinion, since most people simply aren’t aware of the classical meanings behind most symbols (and since meaning often changes according to the contexts), then this is a particularly ineffective way of sending a signal. Personally, I just enjoy them for the effects.

If you have the time and inclination, you might be tempted to follow the links to his other articles which list examples of the symbolism and hidden/secret messages that she is sending on behalf of our Zeta-Reticulan overlords.  I rather liked the assertion that her frequent use of her fingers framing her eyes are examples of the “eye in the pyramid”, which, as everyone knows, is a Masonic symbol (finding it on the back of our money and all that).

Yeah, I know. He’s just some guy with too much time on his hands writing a blog, right? I mean, they’ll let anybody have a blog nowadays  — as witnessed by the very one that you’re reading.

But more instructive is not the blog itself, but the literally several hundred comments on these posts by people who are not just agreeing, but often augmenting them with links and information and theories of their own.  I’m less worried about the one blog than I am about the hundreds — perhaps thousands — of people who take it so seriously.

Sometimes I read these conspiracy theories and I marvel at the amount of effort that people put into them; the connections and inferences drawn, the hunt for the data, and the time taken to make these mental leaps. But other times I simply shake my head and wonder why they bother.

Maybe, when our lives simply aren’t going the way we’d like them to be, it’s just easier to point to some larger conspiracy that keeps us from achieving our goals and dreams, instead of simply accepting that sometimes — perhaps most of the time — we can’t always get what we want.