Twilight Language

Twilight language is a concept that is often mentioned in this blog so I feel its time for a more in depth examination of the complex phenomenon and how it relates to many of the other topics that are discussed here.

There are many different definitions of twilight language. Officially twilight language is a polysemic language and communication system dealing with visual, verbal and nonverbal communications within Tantric Buddhism and Hinduism. In other words, it was a secret symbolic language of which only the initiates of these faiths would be able to understand. In theory this language would have even predated Sanskrit and may not have even been written down initially. Loren Coleman elaborates:

"Buddhism's tantras are thousands of years old and yet never publicly revealed, never written down. Gradually it became necessary to write the secrets down so they would not be completely lost. But when they were written, they were written in a 'twilight language,' that is, in allegory, symbolism, code, so they could not be misinterpreted and misused by unworthy seekers. For this reason, if we do not have a proper guide, the ancient texts may be confusing or even misleading to us today."
(The Copycat Effect, pg. 237)

However, many other groups through out history have had a concept of twilight language. Secret societies of all eras have found it attractive for maintaining their secrecy. Naturally many of the initiated members we given a far more noble explanation for their coded speak. Michael A Hoffman states:

"In the secret societies, 'twilight language,' was advertised as the 'Adamic language,' the language Adam learned from God in Eden, 'the key to divine knowledge.' "
(Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare, pg.7)

For our purposes, the best definition has been given by Coleman:

" 'Twilight language' concerns, from psychology, the hidden significance of locations, dates, and other signs; from religious studies, the hidden symbolism that lies in the texture of the incidents; and, from criminology, the profiling insights that have revealed the ritualistic nature of certain crimes and violent incidents...

"...But two elements of this 'twilight language' are becoming rather clearer as we examine this whole arena. The copycat effect can work through the power and pull over vulnerable and angry human beings through the specific locations where these incidents happen as well as the timing of them. Place and time, locations and dates, milieu and moment are hiding in plain sight."
(The Copycat Effect, pg. 237-238)

 I've already focused a lot in my "New World?" series on the power locations can have over people as well as the structures that are built on or near these locations to harness that power. In this installment I hope to focus more on the symbolism, rituals, and archetypes that infest twilight language for I believe these things are closer to the origins of this secret code. In fact, I do not believe that twilight language even originates from human beings, but was rather something that was handed down to us from somewhere else. Certain symbols, archetypes, and rituals have appeared the world over in countless cultures even when now ready explanation of diffusion is available. Reference to this is found in the traditions of various shamans the world over:

"Wherever these 'technicians of ecstasy' [shamans -Recluse] operate, they specialize in a trance during which their 'soul is believed to leave the body and ascend to the sky or descend to the underworld.' They all speak a 'secret language' which they learn directly from the spirits, by imitation. They talk of a ladder -or a vine, a rope, a spiral staircase, a twisted rope ladder -that connects heaven and earth and which they use to gain access to the world of spirits. They consider these spirits to have come from the sky and to have created life on earth."
(The Cosmic Serpent, Jeremy Narby, pg. 17)

The ladder is one of these symbols that I'm referring to. The ladder, or some variation on it such as a rope or bridge, reaching upwards toward the heavens appears over and over again in world mythology and religion. The most famous example of this is of course Jacob's Ladder:

"Jacob left Beersheba, and went toward Haran. He came to the place and stayed there that night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place to sleep. And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it! And behold, the Lord stood above it [or 'beside him'] and said, 'I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your descendants; and your descendants shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and by you and your descendants shall all the families of the earth bless themselves. Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done that of which I have spoken to you.' Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, 'Surely the Lord is in this place; and I did not know it.' And he was afraid, and said, 'This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.' "

Book of Genesis (28:11-19)

Countless other traditions of ladders appear the world over in shamanistic traditions:

"...there were 'countless examples' of shamanic ladders on all five continents, here a 'spiral ladder,' there a 'stairway' or 'braided ropes.' In Australia, Tibet, Nepal, Ancient Egypt, Africa, North and South America, 'the symbolism of the rope, like that of the ladder, necessarily implies communication between the sky and earth. It is by means of a rope or a ladder (as, too, by a vine, bridge, a chain of arrows, etc.) that the gods descend to earth and men go up to the sky.' "

(The Cosmic Serpent, Jeremy Narby, pg. 63)

The ladder is something that even we in VISUP are effected by. My partner Stofphia, who does the lucid dream logs, often dreams of some kind of ladder, stairway or bridge when he's about to go lucid. The ladder or like structure is always very unstable and ascending. For more information on Stofphia's experiences, check out his YouTube log here.

Another common symbol that appears over and over again and is closely related with the ladder, is that of the serpent. As I noted in a previous post, serpents were often closely associated with ley lines in mythology. In both Medieval Europe and ancient China great dragons were said to follow the course of these lines while in the Americas leys were said to be the domain of the cosmic serpents. Anthropologist Jeremy Narby adds:

"People who drink ayahuasca [a DMT containing drink -Recluse] see colorful and gigantic snakes more than any other vision -be it a Tukano Indian, an urbanized shaman, an anthropologist, or a wandering American poet...

"... I discovered that the serpent was associated just about everywhere with shamanic knowledge -even in regions where hallucinogens are not used and where snakes are unknown in the local environment. Mircea Eliade says that in Siberia the serpent occurs in shamanic ideology and in the shaman's costume among peoples where 'the reptile itself is unknown.'

"Then I learned that in an endless number of myths, a gigantic and terrifying serpent, or a dragon, guards the axis of knowledge, which is represented in the form of a ladder (or a vine, a cord, a tree...). I also learned that (cosmic)serpents abound in the creation myths of the world and that they are not only at the origin of knowledge, but of life itself.

"Snakes are omnipresent not only in the hallucinations, myths, and symbols of human beings in general, but also in their dreams. According to some studies, 'Manhattanites dream of them with the same frequency as Zulus.'"
(The Cosmic Serpent, pg. 113-114)

Symbols such as the ladder and the serpent are not the only thing handed down to us in twilight language. Another common manifestation are in rituals. The psychologist Carl Jung encountered one of the classic examples of how twilight language is used even by those with no concept of it, or reality in general:

"One day while making the rounds Jung found the young man standing at a window and staring up at the sun. The man was also moving his head from side to side in a curious manner. When Jung asked him what he was doing he explained that he was looking at the sun's penis, and when he moved his head from side to side, the sun's penis moved and caused the wind to blow.

"At the time Jung viewed the man's assertion as the product of a hallucination. But several years later he came across a translation of a two-thousand-year-old Persian religious text that changed his mind. The text consisted of a series of rituals and invocations designed to bring on visions. It described one of the visions and said that if the participant looked at the sun he would see a tube hanging down from it, and when the tube moved from side to side it would cause the wind to blow. Since circumstances made it extremely unlikely that the man had had contact with the text containing the ritual, Jung concluded that the man's vision was not simply a product of his unconscious mind, but had bubbled up from a deeper level, from the collective unconscious of the human race itself."
(The Holographic Universe, Michael Talbot, pg. 60)

As a side note, I can personally attest to the mysterious appearance of rituals at a subconscious level. For instance, I began making a 'fig sign' at a very, very young age with my thumb between middle and ring fingers and have continued, usually accidentally, into adulthood.

In my writing I wrote a short story years ago (which was somehow miraculously published) in which I would rather accurately describe what is known as a scapegoating ritual. This was back around 2002, years before I learned anything of occult workings.

But back to Jung. His theory of the collective unconscious is crucial to understanding the 'where' of twilight language. Jung defined it as:

"The collective unconscious is a part of the psyche which can be negatively distinguished from a personal unconscious by the fact that it does not, like the latter, owe its existence to personal experience and consequently is not a personal acquisition. While the personal unconscious is made up essentially of contents which have at one time been conscious but which have disappeared from consciousness through having been forgotten or repressed, the contents of the collective unconscious have never been in consciousness, and therefore have never been individually acquired, but owe their existence exclusively to heredity. Whereas the personal unconscious consists for the most part of complexes, the content of the collective unconscious is made up essentially of archetypes...

"... In addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents."
(The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, pg. 42-43)

Jung believed that this collective unconscious pre-dated both words and thought. It went al the way back to our most primitive origins and perhaps beyond:

"It is sufficient to know that there is not a single important idea or view that does not possess historical antecedents. Ultimately they are all founded on a primordial archetypal forms whose concreteness dates from a time when consciousness did not think, but only perceived. 'Thoughts' were objects of inner perception, not thought at all, but sensed as external phenomena -seen or heard, so to speak. Thought was essentially revelation, not invented but forced upon us or bringing conviction through its immediacy and actuality. Thinking of this kind precedes the primitive ego-consciousness, and the latter is more its object that its subject. But we ourselves have not yet climbed the last peak of consciousness, so we also have a pre-existent thinking, of which we are not aware so long as we are supported by traditional symbols -or, to put it in the language of dreams, so long as the father or the king is not dead."
(The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, pg.33)

Jung's theory of the collective unconscious and its development through signs and symbols is consistent with Jeremy Narby's findings concerning the twilight language traditions of shamans and other ancient traditions:

"...Nature talks in signs and, to understand its language, one has to pay attention to similarities in form. He had also said that the spirits of nature communicate with human beings in hallucinations and dreams -in other words, in mental images. The idea is common in 'pre-rational' traditions. For instance, Heraclitus said of the Pythian oracle (from the Greek puthon, 'serpent') that it 'neither declares nor conceals, but gives a sign.'"
(The Cosmic Serpent, pg. 96-97)

Among the most powerful symbols of the collective unconscious, as Jung alluded to above, are the archetypes. Of these, Jung states:

"Since for years I have been observing and investigating the products of the unconscious in the widest sense of the word, namely dreams, fantasies, visions, and delusions of the insane, I have not been able to avoid recognizing certain regularities, that is, types. There are types of situations and types of figures that repeat themselves frequently and have a corresponding meaning. I therefore employ the 'motif' to designate these repetitions. Thus there are not only typical dreams but typical motifs in dreams. These may, as we have said, be situations or figures. Among the latter there are human figures that can be arranged under a series of archetypes, the chief of them being, according to my suggestion, the shadow, the wise old man, the child (including the child hero), the mother ('Primordial Mother' and 'Earth Mother') as a supraordinate personality ('daemonic' because supraordinate), and her counterpart the maiden, and lastly the anima in man and the animus in woman."
(The Archetype and the Collective Unconscious, pg. 183)

Jung believed many extreme cases of mental illness were the result of possession by the these archetypes. He notes:

"The chief danger is that of succumbing to the fascinating influence of the archetypes, and that is most likely to happen when the archetypal figures, which are endowed with a certain autonomy anyway on account of their natural numinosity, will escape from conscious control altogether and become completely independent, thus producing the phenomena of possession. In the case of anima-possession for instance, the patient will want to change himself into a woman through self-castrtion, or he is afraid that something of the sort will be done to him by force."
(The Archetype and the Collective Unconscious, pg. 39)

Possession via the archetype is not merely a threat to the mentally unstable but to entire societies who can be induced to mass madness via archetype identification. Nazi Germany stands as a fine example of this in the modern era. But tyrants throughout history have used this technique. Anthropologist Joseph Campbell notes:

"The highest concern of all the mythologies, ceremonials, ethical systems, and social organization of the agriculturally based societies has been that of suppressing the manifestation of the individualism; and this has been generally achieved by compelling or persuading people to identify themselves not with their own interests, intuitions, or modes of experience, but with the archetypes of behavior and systems of sentiment developed and maintained in the public domain."
(Masks of God: Primitive Mythology, pg. 240)

All high civilizations were agrarian. Hunter-gatherers typically remained nomads. In general as a civilization becomes more advanced it becomes more consumed with stifling the individuality of its citizens for the sake of order. In the modern era this has been taken to a whole new level with the introduction of mass media. Now archetypes can constantly be transmitted from person to person through what are known as memes, which are defined as:

"A meme (pronounced meem is a contagious idea that replicates like a virus, passing from mind to mind. 'Memes function the same way genes and viruses do, propagating through communication networks and face-to-face contact between people'... 'Memetics,' a field of study, postulates that the meme is the basic unit of cultural evolution. Examples of memes include melodies, icons, fashion statements and phrases.' "
(The Copycat Effect, Loren Coleman, pg. 254)

This means that the barrage of twilight language with its archetypes, symbols and numbers, is constantly working its ritual magick upon us not just through our entertainment but through our day-to-day encounters with other people that infected by the memes. Thusly even those that attempt to escape from the conditioning of mass media by abstaining from it are still subjected to it in their day to day interactions.

This is why this blog focuses so much on serial killers, spree shootings, and the like. While I do believe a very few of these events are deliberately orchestrated by the Cryptocracy in most cases there is no need for such trickery. The endless flow of twilight language the mass media baths us in wrecks havoc on the angry and unstable among us and sending them into rampages. In many cases the mass media is amplified by other aspects of the twilight language such as locations and dates. Certain areas of the Earth naturally attract negativity as do certain days in the year. Fused with ritualistic symbolism and archetypes of the modern media countless are brought to the brink and many past it. Loren Coleman, writing of the work of meme researcher Paul Marsden, adds:

"Marseden had become a firm convert to the meme. He feels that 'mind viruses spread through a Darwinian process of imitation. We know for example that if a suicide is reported in the mass media, the suicide rate will rise in the following month. A few people with poor immunity to this mind virus will become infected and display similarly symptoms to the original victim -they will commit suicide.' Furthermore, writes Marseden, 'the amount of violence seen on US television screens correlates positively with US homicides. We know as well that suicide victims following publicized suicide story will more likely than not resemble the reported victim.

"The point is that the copycat effect is real. Social scientists know it exists and are working hard at conceptualizing it in the framework of new theories about its rise and spread. Advertisers know that it works and use it as an accepted way to market their products. And the media knows it is real, too, using it to focus on the next epidemic, the next death story, or the next threat -and unconsciously triggering the next event they will be reporting on."
(The Copycat Effect, pgs. 254-255)

Michael A Hoffman gets to the bottom line:

"Ritual murder is mind control. It's not always earth compensation for sacrilegious tampering. It can be ceremonial, possessing a liturgy that uses twilight language to imprint the Group Mind, the entity that is formed psychically when large numbers of people are intently focused on the same object, image or symbol...

"Some people assume that I believe that all these developments are part of a microscopically orchestrated 'masterplan' devised by invincible Freemasons. But the cryptocrats are just highly informed weathermen possessed of extraordinary daring. They had a sense of what direction the wind of time, the 'spirit of the age' would take, but that doesn't mean they control the wind, or that they are the wind.

"...A substantial portion of the power of secret societies comes from hitching a ride on coincidence. In your opening statement you said that it remains to be seen whether the occult connections I study 'are deliberate or merely coincidental.'

"To me it's the same thing. Ritual cannot rely exclusively on human machination to obtain the full effect."
(Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare, pgs. 128-130)

There's not much I can add. The simple reality is that dates, locations, symbols, archetypes, and ritualized situations effect us all on a daily basis regardless of how unaware we may be of them. Ignorance of twilight language on the part of the American public have been devastating. We're the most heavily medicated people on Earth. Despite this random acts of insanity, ranging anywhere from road rage to school shootings, are a daily issue we all confront. Our national image is of some champion of 'democracy,' though this 'democracy' always seems to be imposed at the barrel of a gun.

I am not generally one to promote mass conformity but I daresay that if there's one thing we all should agree on, it's that we must learn as much about this twilight language as we possibly can for our own sanity, if nothing else. If there are actually any readers out there, I would love to read their views on this phenomenon.