The Scottish Rite?

By now I'm sure many of you have heard about the suicide of famed British producer and director Tony Scott during the early hours of August 19, 2012. Scott was the younger brother of the even more acclaimed filmmaker Ridley, but had carved out his own impressive niche in Hollywood. Tony Scott was the director of The Hunger, Top Gun, The Last Boy Scout, True Romance (a personal favorite of Recluse's), Crimson Tide, Enemy of the State, and Man on Fire, among many others. He had also worked extensively in commercials and had occasionally ventured into television shows (i.e. Numb3rs, which he co-produced with Ridley Scott). Of his suicide, the press has noted:

"Hollywood director Tony Scott has plunged to his death from a Los Angeles bridge after penning a suicide note - falling within feet of horrified tourists on a harbour boat cruise. 

"The 68-year-old, who directed films including Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop II and Enemy Of The State, leaped from the Vincent Thomas Bridge at around 12.30pm on Sunday. 

" 'He landed right next to our tour boat, and many of us saw the whole thing,' a witness, who had been on the cruise around the Los Angeles Harbour, told TMZ. 

"Just weeks before his death, Scott was pictured looking dishevelled and wide-eyed as he left a dinner in Beverly Hills on July 23... 

"The Los Angeles County Coroner's Office said an autopsy is planned and results could be expected as early as this afternoon.

"According to the Contra Costa Times, Scott climbed a fence on the south side of the bridge, which spans San Pedro and Terminal Island, at 12.30 p.m. on Sunday and leaped off 'without hesitation'.

Several people called 911 around 12.35pm to report that someone had jumped off the bridge, according to Los Angeles police Lt. Tim Nordquist. Police are interviewing witnesses.

"A dive team with Los Angeles Port Police pulled the body from the murky water around 3pm. It was taken to a dock in Wilmington and turned over to the county coroner's office.

"Investigators found a note in Scott's black Toyota Prius, which was parked on the bridge, according to the Los Angeles Times. It listed contact information for his wife.

"A suicide note was later found at his office but its contents were not revealed."

Director Tony Scott with his trademark red ballcap

The great and ever-prolific Loren Coleman has already posted a provocative piece on his blog questioning whether Scott's suicide was yet another case of the Killing of the Divine King. Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with this concept, a topic that I've addressed before on posts such as this. For those of your unaware I shall now engage in a brief rundown.

The concept of Killing the Divine King was first formalized by James Frazer in his legendary work The Golden Bough where he attempted to explain the gruesome rituals associated with the King of the Wood of Nemi during Roman times. More recently this concept was embraced by the great James Shelby Downard in an attempt to explain the ritualistic aspects of the Kennedy assassination. Downard's colleague and friend, William Grimstad, presented a skeptical account of Downard's theories in his synchro-mystic classic Weird America:

"Would you believe John F. Kennedy as a ceremonial king-who-must-die? I'm afraid there is a certain body of opinion, undoubtedly the farthest-out brain wave of assassinology yet, that maintains the killing was pulled off, not by the Russians, the Cubans, the CIA, or the Mafia, but by alchemists. As I understand the hypothesis, President Kennedy was for some reason chosen as The King (remember 'Camelot,' 'MacBird' and all that?) after the fashion of James G. Frazer and Mary Renault whose The King Must Die he had been given to read before his death."
(pg. 213-214)

Michael A. Hoffman, another researcher closely associated with Downard and Grimstad, had this to say of the sacrificial nature of Kennedy's death:

"The Killing of the King rite was accomplished at another Trinity site located approximately ten miles south of the 33rd degree of north parallel latitude between the Trinity River and the Triple Underpass at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. Dealey Plaza was the site of the first masonic temple in Dallas. In this spot, which had been known during the 19th century cowboy era as 'Bloody Elm Street,' the world leader who had become known as the 'King of Camelot,' President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was shot to death."(Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare, pg. 83)

Is Scott's death yet another instance of these gruesome rites of antiquity? Initially I was rather skeptical of such a conclusion, but there are some strange aspects of this affair to consider. For one, there's Scott's not-so-subtle ties to the US Intelligence community. As I noted before here, one of Scott's most well known films, Top Gun, was essentially a collaboration between Hollywood and the DoD in which the Pentagon had final approval over the script. Top Gun was a major success for all involved, and led to a spike in military enlistments with its flag-waving jingoism.

Originally Scott's suicide was being blamed on inoperable brain cancer but his family quickly came out and debunked these claims. Thus, there is no clear motive for his suicide at this point, though there have been some interesting theories put forth. On his blog post concerning Scott, Loren Coleman ponders "Could Tony Scott, being a king of cinema mayhem, have been sacrificed (by his own hand through suicide) to bring balance back into the universe in the wake of what happened in Aurora? Was he thinking about what kind of society his movies had created?" Scott's suicide occurred almost a month exactly after the Aurora shooting, so that's certainly a possibility. What's more, Scott apparently began to act erratically on July 23, historically the beginning of the Dog Days of Summer. The Aurora shooting had several strange overlaps with the Dog Days and Sirius (the Dog Star, whose helical rising was the basis for the Dog Days celebration) which I've chronicled before here.

the Dog Days (top) and Tony Scott on July 23, 2012 (bottom)

However, I doubt it was just Aurora Scott was filling guilty about if such motivations are in fact what drove him to suicide. Scott's checkered past as a military propagandist who has glorified the American Empire surely weighed heavy upon his soul as well. Perhaps later films such as Enemy of the State were his attempts at atonement. Apparently, it didn't work as his suicide indicates. Oddly, Scott's suicide comes a month after the military, whose ranks he helped swell over the years, just experienced an all time high in suicides this past July. 

The military aspect of Scott's death is further re-enforced by the location of Scott's death. Scott jumped from the Vincent Thomas Bridge, which connects San Pedro on one side and Terminal Island on the others. Terminal Island, a place originally called 'Rattlesnake Island,' has a rather grim history. In the early 20th century it was home to several thousand first and second generation Japanese immigrants. After the outbreak of WWII, many of these Terminal Island residents were rounded up and put in internment camps. Their community on Terminal Island was razed and replaced with a training field for the Naval Reserve. A few years later the Long Beach Naval Shipyard would be established there and would remain a major hub for the Navy until being closed in 1997.

Terminal Island is also home a Federal Correctional Institute. It housed several high profile inmates such as Al Capone, Timothy Leary and a pre-Helter Skelter Charles Manson, who served two terms there, once in the late 1950s and the second just before he was released in 1967. The second time around was apparently highly beneficial to Manson.

"In June 1966, Manson was transferred from McNeil Island to Terminal Island in San Pedro, California. At this time, friends remember Charlie as fanatically dedicated to his music. One person who served time with Charlie --and became impressed with his musical abilities --was Phil Kaufman, then serving time on a federal marijuana rap. 

"In the Terminal Island prison yard, Kaufman encountered Charlie playing guitar one day, and afterwards gave Manson contacts with people involved in the Hollywood music scene. Toward the end of 1967, these contacts would allow Charlie entrance into Universal Studios to record some demos. Kaufman later went on to become a bit of living legend himself, road-managing some of the biggest names in rock and roll, such as The Rolling Stones, Joe Cocker, Gram Parsons, Emmylou Harris and Frank Zappa, along the way earning the dubious title 'Road Mangler.' "
(The Shadow Over Santa Susana, Adam Gorightly, pg. 13)

Phil Kaufman is one of those curious counterculture figures who pop up around any number of weird events from that era. Famously, he was the roadie that stole Gram Parsons' body and burned it at Joshua Tree National Park in some kind of bizarre ritual. Manson, before famously begging officials to not release him from Terminal Island, also made some other curious contacts there.

"Manson had by this time perfected a sort of technique on the guitar, taught to him by Terminal Island inmate Al Karpis (the last surviving member of the Ma Baker gang), and had begun writing his own songs. Manson had also learned the basics of Scientology from another inmate, Lanier Ramer (or 'Raymer'). It was that combination --music and Scientology --that comprised the only education he had of the real world outside prison walls. But it was enough."
(Sinister Forces Book I, Peter Levenda, pgs. 203-204)

Indeed. Whether Manson factored at all into Tony Scott's decision to kill himself in the shadow of Terminal Island is impossible to say at this point, but Manson is the chief pop culture icon associated with the area.

Another curious aspect of the location of Scott's death, and possibly its most blatant link to the Killing of the Divine King, is the latitude line that runs along Terminal Island (and presumably the bridge Scott jumped from): the thirty-third parallel. The thirty-third parallel plays heavily into Downard, Grimstad and Hoffman's theories concerning the Killing of the Divine King, as noted above. The thirty-third parallel also appears near the first atomic bomb explosion at the Trinity Site in New Mexico.

"Other occult rituals for the Creation and Destruction of Primordial Matter were played out in the general area of the 33rd degree of north parallel latitude in Truth or Consequence, New Mexico, near the Trinity Site. 

"There are 33 segments in the human spinal column which, according to occult lore is the vehicle of the fiery ascent of the Kundalini serpent force which resides in the human body. 33 is the highest degree of Scottish Rite Freemasonry. Near the Trinity Site a derelict shack was symbolically dubbed 'McDonald House.' The Creation and Destruction of Primordial Matter occurred exactly on the Trinity Site, the 'Place of Fire,' with the explosion of the first atomic bomb, culminating untold thousands of years of alchemical speculation and practice.",
(Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare, Michael A. Hoffman II, pg. 83)

Downard and Hoffman considered the explosion of the first atomic bomb at Trinity to be the first step in what they dubbed 'the Creation and Destruction of Primordial Matter.' The second stage was the Killing of the Divine King, which was accomplished with the Kennedy assassination. Both events happened on or near the thirty-third parallel. Numerous other strange and bloody events have also happened around the thirty-third, which I've chronicled here.

So, was director Tony Scott the latest victim of the thirty-third parallel, which some researchers have dubbed the death line? I've yet to see any concrete evidence emerge, but the synchronicity and twilight language of this event is most curious. The association of Scott with 33 is especially dubious. As noted above, 33 is the highest degree of Scottish Rite Freemasonry (which most Masonic conspiracy theories center around) and now Tony Scott has committed suicide along the thirty-third parallel.

How synchronicistic.