Big thank-you to my friends Russ and Kyle and the team at the Brothers of the Serpent podcast for inviting me back for another conversation about stars and myths, and welcome to any new visitors coming to the site for the first time as a result of that recent episode (as well as returning friends)!
As the Snake Bros themselves are in fact master winemakers, and as it is harvest season for the grapes in their part of Texas, we had the happy inspiration to explore aspects of the multi-shaped and many-named god of wine, Dionysos, during this visit.
Above is the video recording of our conversation, which is recommended because I included numerous visual images and star-charts for illustration of some of the arguments (you can also follow this link to see the video version of the episode).
Some of the material in this conversation echoes points discussed in this 2016 blog post entitled "Dionysos: mighty and many-shaped god," while some of it is completely new. We also discuss some of the activities that Russ and Kyle and their wider team are performing right now as they supervise the current vintage.
This conversation was recorded on 18 August, 2021.
You can find my previous visit to the Brothers of the Serpent podcast in the "Podcasts" section of my main website (along with many other archived podcasts from around the podcast world).
It's always a pleasure to talk with the Snake Brothers and I think you will agree they have a dynamic that is all their own.
I hope that you will enjoy this conversation: if so, please feel free to share it with others, as well as to give Russ and Kyle some positive feedback for their hard work and their unique insights and observations!
The Indigenous nations of Australia are understood to represent the oldest continuous culture on Earth, stretching back tens of thousands of years -- thought to have remained in near-undisturbed isolation from other cultures from as many as 75,000 years ago (or at least 50,000 years ago) until about 500 years ago.
Intriguingly, despite this astounding length of time and relative isolation, some of the stories preserved in the sacred traditions of the many nations and cultures of the Australian Indigenous people show signs of the very same system of celestial metaphor which underlies the ancient myths and sacred traditions of other cultures from the other continents and islands of our globe, which is very important to consider as we try to learn more about the ancient story of humanity.
In common with myths and sacred traditions from around the world, the sacred stories of Australia have been preserved orally and often in the form of song and verse. The haunting and unique vibrating instrument commonly known as the didgeridoo (there are many different names for this instrument among the various Australian Aboriginal nations) plays a very important role in sacred song-cycles and story-telling among the Indigenous people of that land.
The playing of this incredible instrument from the Indigenous cultures of Australia is characterized by a technique which is commonly called "circular breathing" through which the droning can be continued even as the musician inhales. It boggles the mind to consider how the didgeridoo was first invented and how many millennia ago that might have been -- and then to consider how this technique of circular breathing was first used among humanity and for how many generations it has been passed down to successive generations, through the long ages of time and continuing to this day.
In recent years, doctors and researchers have learned that the technique of circular breathing can actually have significant beneficial effects for the reduction of obstructive sleep apnea and snoring, as well as with daytime sleepiness which is associated with lack of good sleep caused by these conditions.
In addition to being associated with daytime sleepiness, sleep apnea is also associated with the risk of serious cardiovascular health conditions, due to the fact that those who suffer from sleep apnea are actually choking multiple times each night as they are sleeping, which as you can imagine is very damaging to the body and the brain. You can find many websites which discuss the terrible health dangers of sleep apnea and snoring.
This paper from a 2005 medical journal discusses the results of a controlled study in which patients with sleep apnea and snoring were given didgeridoo lessons and asked to practice a specific number of times per week -- a study which found statistically significant beneficial effects from those selected to play the didgeridoo (versus those in the control group, who had to wait until after the study was over to receive their lessons). You can also find the study results reproduced on the website of the US National Library of Medicine, here.
Learning the technique of circular breathing is challenging in the same way that first learning to drive stickshift is challenging, or in the way that playing piano (especially styles such as boogie-woogie) is challenging, in that the brain and body needs to learn to do two different and even contradictory actions simultaneously -- and the challenge is compounded by the fact that in the case of circular breathing, these seemingly-contradictory actions do not involve movements of the hands and feet but rather the very act of breathing itself, which is even more fundamental and even more ingrained and difficult to change (and upon which our very life depends from one minute to the next, making the act of learning to do it a new way somewhat more discomforting than the act of learning to drive stick or play the piano).
Fortunately, in the age of the web and online resources, there are a number of videos one can find to help with the process of learning this amazing ancient technique for the didgeridoo. I recently purchased a didgeridoo from the good people at DidgeridooBreath in Western Australia, which included fantastically helpful video lessons from Yoshitaka Saegusa -- "Sanshi" -- which got me on my way to learning circular breathing (each lesson ending with Sanshi's admonition to go practice each new step "1,000 times!!!").
I also found videos from David Yates of Breathwood and AJ Block of DidgeProject to be extremely helpful in starting to connect the drone past the inhales, and starting to learn some rhythms. And of course I am now enjoying watching videos of master musicians on the didgeridoo such as David Hudson and the above-linked Lewis Burns.
I'm still very new to this amazing instrument and its ancient history, but I can say that it is extremely addictive (something that is actually referenced in that medical study linked above, in which the authors note that while "compliance" with medical recommendations is often a major issue, the participants in the didgeridoo study ended up practicing their didgeridoos for longer periods and for more days of the week than they were told to do so in the study).
Below is a recent video of my efforts so far, and below that is another video which I made during the period that I was working on my first steps in circular breathing, in which I mention a couple things that helped me at the time. I wanted to preserve those while they were still fresh in my mind -- if they can be helpful to anyone who is working on it, that's great, but if they are not helpful then just ignore them!
But, since sleep apnea can have such serious negative health effects, I figure that if my humble progress as a new player can be of help to even one person somewhere, it's worth it.
The didgeridoo is considered a sacred instrument. I am convinced that every single man or woman is in fact a sacred instrument -- and that all musical instruments are really only an extension which enables us to better express the music that we already have inside.
The sacred didgeridoo is connected to the song-cycles and sacred stories of the ancient cultures of the original people of the continent of Australia. I am convinced that the ancient myths and ancient wisdom of the cultures of the world have a profound message for us today, in this very present moment -- and that it is very possible we need them today more than ever.
Respect and Gratitude to the Indigenous nations of Australia who have preserved this ancient treasure -- may they continue to pass down the ancient wisdom of their people to their future generations for at least another 50,000 years!
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Below are two clips, the first of me playing today, and the one below it from a week before with my attempts to connect the drone and learn circular breathing, and the various techniques and notes I was making for myself at the time as I was going through that process:
This day, August 08, marks another anniversary of the horrific murders of seven men and women in 1969, five of them on the night of August 8th and 9th at Cielo Drive and a married couple on the night of August 9th and 10th on Waverly Drive, which have come to be known as the Tate-LaBianca Murders, or the Manson Murders.
These gruesome killings of Sharon Tate (who was over eight months pregnant with her unborn baby boy), Abigail Folger, Wojciech (also sometimes spelled Voytek) Frykowski, Jay Sebring, and Steven Parent at Cielo Drive, and of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca the following night, traumatized the world and would continue to do so throughout the decade to follow.
Intrepid researcher and broadcaster Mae Brussell (1922 - 1980) almost immediately realized that these murders fit into a pattern she had already seen playing out many times previously, including in the murders of President John F. Kennedy, his brother Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X.
You can hear Mae giving some of her analysis regarding the Manson operation from a broadcast she initially aired in October of 1971, just two years after the killings, in this archived file.
In that broadcast from 1971, Mae states very clearly -- backed up with evidence -- that the killings were a political operation, pre-planned and executed with evidence of military precision and tactics including the cutting of telephone lines and the silencing of dogs on the property, with the purpose of discrediting and indeed destroying the anti-war counter-culture movement that had been growing ever since the start of the Vietnam War and which was growing to a crescendo in the summer of 1969.
Following on Mae's analysis, John Judge would later explain in a 1990 interview with Prevailing Winds Research (or PWR):
The Manson Family didn't come out of nowhere. Charlie Manson was a long-time racist and pimp and inhabitant of juvenile criminal facilities. His mother was a prostitute. In fact, she was close friends with another prostitute who was the mother of Sara Jane Moore, someone that Manson played with, a kid that was part of another conspiracy -- he grew up with one of the key figures in another operation.
[. . .]
The women came from top-ranking military intelligence families -- they weren't little girls off the street with no money. They came from families with a lot of bucks and with ties into the Pentagon. Once the scenario was set up they gave him MKULTRA drugs, the mind control drugs, to give to the women.
[. . .]
They let him think he was king out there in the desert in his little shack and beefed him up with the idea that there was going to be a race war and he was going to survive and all this crazy stuff. After he was rearrested and dragged back in, Manson said, "I want to know who was peeing on my leash." Because he understood that he was let out a certain amount and then dragged back in, pulled back with a collar before he could bite. So he understands enough to know that he was manipulated. No pleasant fellow. I mean, not somebody you'd want to spend a lot of time with, but not him the real mover and shaker of the situation.
The killer was Tex Watson, whose family is in the sheriff's office in Dallas and was at the time of the Kennedy assassination. The Watsons are the dominant family there who ran the turf for the sheriff's office under Captain Fritz. Tex Watson was well connected enough that they couldn't even extradite him to California for trial. Vincent Bugliosi said they had to go down and try him in Texas. In Texas he gave a completely different trial if you get that transcript. He didn't say that Manson ran Watson and controlled him by mind control and hardcore charisma and all the nonsense that he pushed up in California. He said that Watson did the killings and Watson made the decisions and that was the case. Watson took the girls with him -- Charlie wasn't there. Watson went into the house, and this was an all-American boy, a football star, born-again Christian: no one could understand why or how he became a hippie convert.
I don't think he was. I think the drugs at the ranch were supplied by military intelligence. The ranch itself had been the scene of many of the western movies that were made by Howard Hughes in the '50s -- the Spahn Movie Ranch -- where they had their operations. Jane Russell was out there and The Outlaw was made there. The owner of the ranch next door, who eventually bought out the Spahn Ranch after The Manson Family scandal was over and is turning it into a Bavarian beer garden operation is the Krupp family -- the munitions and arms provisioners for Nazi Germany. Not the sort of folks who'd have just a bunch of scrounger neighbors without commenting on it.
So I think the whole thing was a setup to discredit hippies and the counter-culture and the left. After that period, you never saw any positive images of counter-culture people on the media. All you saw was Manson and the idea that if you didn't go along with the society, dropped out, or lived communally or took drugs that you'd turn into this raging beast and stab people in the stomach. In the same way Altamont, I believe, was set up by military intelligence to discredit Woodstock and to be the dark side of the coin with The Rolling Stones and Melvin Belli. But there were deeper connections behind who Manson was and whom he knew.
[. . .]
Robert Kennedy ate dinner at the Tate house the night before he went to the Ambassador and was shot, so I think there is a link between the Robert Kennedy assassination and this circle. I think it's basically a Pentagon-Hollywood Axis, as Mae Brussell called it. Key people who hung around the Tate house were part of that drug circle that was fairly sadistic. They'd take young kids in off the street and rape them, black magic nonsense: there were tapes of that the police found in the house. There were also clues that didn't match such as a pair of glasses that didn't belong to any of the family members -- the bodies seemed to have been repositioned after the time of the murder -- maybe evidence removed.
[. . .] but the reality is that the CIA is training the assassins. So I think Manson was basically set up to take this fall. He's not beyond killing somebody, but I don't think that he did the actual Tate and LaBianca murders. Those people were also drug dealers. Voytek Frykowski was a big dealer of MDA and Mr. LaBianca was a coke and smack dealer for the Toronto syndicate, the drugs that were coming down through Toronto after the Cuban connection and the Marseilles connection had been cut off. A lot of drugs came through Seattle and down the coast into San Francisco and the Bay Area. So these people were major dealers and I think they pulled a burn and got paid back as part of this scenario because when you do these things at the orchestrated level they usually are "bonus operations" -- you get several things done at once. That's how you peg it, you know: we're going to do a killing, let's make the killing count, accomplish as many things as they could. Judge For YourSelf: 221 - 225.
The implications of the above analysis -- analysis which argues (based on abundant evidence) that the Manson operation was deliberately used to "discredit the hippies and the counter-culture and the left" and that official government agencies have trained assassins (including assassins involved in the murder of domestic citizens) and supplied Manson with mind-control drugs (and with mind-control techniques, which were also perfected using experimentation on domestic citizens, as argued based upon abundant evidence in author Tom O'Neill's 2019 tour-de-force book Chaos) -- are enormous.
One of the more interesting movies ever allowed out of Hollywood to explore some of these implications is Three Days of the Condor, released in 1975.
While the movie may on the surface seem to have nothing to do with the gruesome killings of 1969, the plot features the cold-blooded murder by contract killers hired by higher-ups within the CIA of seven unsuspecting other CIA intelligence agents in a New York office -- and protagonist Robert Redford repeatedly expresses his shock regarding those "seven people killed" (by his own agency) throughout the rest of the film.
If you have never seen it, you may want to watch it before reading further.
If you have seen it, you know that Robert Redford's character (Joe Turner) discovers -- simply by reading the published books and articles available to everyone, and then connecting the dots for himself -- evidence of a plot to seize control of oilfields in the Middle East and Venezuela. When he presents this analysis to his superiors in his New York City office, who then forward the analysis up to higher headquarters, a hit team is dispatched to kill everyone in the office (including of course Turner, who escapes the carnage because it was his turn to pick up lunch that day when the hit team arrives).
At the end of the film, having continually evaded the killers sent to track him down, Redford's character has a confrontation with the agency's New York Deputy Director, "J. Higgins," played by Cliff Robertson. During this confrontation, the character of Higgins gives his justification for the extra-legal activities that his agency performs on behalf of those seeking to gain control over the world's natural resources -- "games" which sometimes result in the murder of citizens as part of the collateral damage.
While Redford's character expresses his disgust at such an argument -- and repeatedly brings up the murder of seven people -- Robertson's character gives a pointed defense of his agency's mission and argues that such operations are necessary to ensure that the ordinary citizens never run out of food or fuel. Above is a clip of that final confrontation, and below is a transcript of the core of the argument, with Robert Redford's character labeled as Turner and Cliff Robertson's labeled as Higgins:
Turner: Do we have plans to invade the Middle East? Do we?
Higgins: No -- absolutely not. We have games: that's all. We play games: what if? How many men? What would it take? Is there a cheaper way, to de-stabilize a regime? That's what we're paid to do.
[. . .]
Turner: Boy -- what is it with you people? You think not getting caught in a lie is the same as telling the truth?
Higgins: No -- it's simple economics. Today it's oil, right? In ten or fifteen years: food, plutonium. And maybe even sooner. Now what do you think that people are gonna want us to do then?
Turner: Ask them.
Higgins: Not now -- then. Ask 'em when they're running out: ask 'em when there's no heat in their homes and they're cold. Ask 'em when their engines stop. Ask 'em when people who've never known hunger start going hungry. You wanna know something? They won't want us to ask 'em: they'll just want us to get it for them.
Turner: Boy -- have you found a home. Seven people killed, Higgins.
Higgins: The Company didn't order it.
Turner: Atwood did -- Atwood did! And who the hell is Atwood? He's you: he's all you guys. Seven people killed! And you play fucking games!
Higgins: Right -- and the other side does too. That's why we can't let you stay outside.
The repeated reference to seven people killed may or may not be an intentional reference to the killings attributed to the Manson "Family," but I would suggest that the repetition of that phrase in 1975 would almost certainly have evoked that connection in listeners, either consciously or unconsciously. The fact that in the Condor film's murder scene, two of those seven victims are women (one of them the young and beautiful girlfriend of Redford's character at the show's start) just as there were two women killed in the Cielo Drive murders, may or may not be seen as supporting evidence for such an interpretation.
In the above confrontation, Cliff Robertson's character Higgins gives a well-delivered argument in which he basically says that without cut-throat and sometimes distasteful operations, Americans might someday run out of fuel -- or even out of food.
This argument, of course, is completely specious, since the United States is not only a self-sufficient producer of food but in fact a massive exporter of food -- although its policies have deliberately sought to destroy the ability of other nations to be self-sufficient producers of their own food, as Michael Hudson has documented with overwhelming evidence in his book Super Imperialism, which was initially published in 1972 and of which the revised 2003 edition is available in its entirety online here.
As for the subject of oil, this part of the dialogue gets to the heart of imperialism itself, and the use of clandestine operations and even overt war to seize the natural resources of other nations -- which Higgins attempts to falsely justify as necessary and "for the good of the people."
As if the only way for the people of the nations of earth to enjoy the bounty of nature's gifts and the resources of the world requires taking those resources by force, accompanied by deception, assassination, and the occasional murder of a nation's own citizens by the agencies of that government.
That false justification is exactly what the rising tide of the counter-culture and the anti-war movement was turning away from en masse during the 1960s -- a rejection which, according to the analysis of Mae Brussell and John Judge cited above, was seen as such a threat that the Manson operation was employed in order to discredit and destroy the counter-culture and its rejection of such cynical and criminal tactics.
Robert Redford's character Joe Turner, then, can be seen as a figure who has connected the dots, simply by reading the available books and articles, and who is traumatized by the callous and double-crossing murder of seven people -- perhaps representative of the situation in which (according to the 1975 film) we all find ourselves.
The character of Kathy Hale, played by Faye Dunaway, is also traumatized during the film -- in this case, because Turner himself kidnaps her as part of his desperate escape. We see that she is living a life of loneliness, taking photographs she won't show to anyone, and together her character and Redford's can perhaps be seen as embodying the predicament of living in a society that is dominated by the kind of cynical and brutalizing and even murderous powers for whom Higgins acts as spokesman.
When Higgins lays out a hypothetical scenario in which the people are running out of food and oil and challenges Turner to tell him what he thinks the people will want their government to do then, Redford's character replies: "Ask them."
Obviously, this reply embodies the assumption that in a democracy, the actions of the government should be dictated by the people.
Higgins' disdainfully replies that (essentially) the people don't care about democracy -- they only care about having the fuel for their cars and the heat for their homes and the food for their table, and they don't care how it gets there.
But that is not true.
If it were true, then deception would not be necessary in covering up plots to seize resources -- and Higgins would not care at all when Turner says he has leaked the story to the press (specifically the New York Times). The film's writers give us another thought-provoking line at the end of the movie, when Higgins asks Turner how he can be so sure that the Times will even print the story -- implying that the same powers that Higgins represents may be in control of the media as well.
Of course, this hint regarding control over the media reveals that, despite the confident assertions Higgins delivers in the above scene, the people would in fact care about the murder of seven people by one's own government agencies -- which is exactly why those agencies feel the need to control the media and prevent such information from becoming public knowledge.
Such was the situation implied by the film in 1975 -- which may well have included a reference to those horrific killings that took place in 1969 -- and if we consider these matters carefully and connect the dots, we may find application to the situation we face today.
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For previous posts on this subject, please see also:
