Hey, Wilson! Greetings from Venice, California! A lot has been going on for me here, but I’ll either say something about that in some other post, or just skip the personal updates from here on out. If I can give a short sentence about my current goings on, I’ll just say that I’ve spent the last couple of months returning to the best semblance of a rational mindset that I can after the Jungian psychonautics experiment afforded me by the stresses of undertaking a trip around the world by myself, as well as every day activities of moving to a new city for a new adventure.
Today, though, I want to tell you about some observations I have made about the trip. Now it’s getting to be mid-July as I write this. To tell you the truth, Wilson, if you ask me, the process of coming back to earth after the world trip is probably a ninety-day process. I headed to LA after a month of rest and recovery in Phoenix, however, as I wanted to be here with boots on the ground when the Flash came out on June 16. When I got to LA I encountered nothing but non-stop fog in this city known for summer sun. That weather pattern persisted until June 16. I actually have video of myself walking into the theater on that cloudy morning to see the film, but upon exiting, there was nothing but sun in a cloudless sky. Since the 16th, there have been a couple of foggy days, but in general the dreary grey has cleared up by noon.
The Flash was an important film for me, first because it was supposed to give Warner’s conclusion of the Snyderverse with its connection to the new DCU slate of films headed up by James Gunn, the director of the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise who had come over from Marvel. I had been quite excited to see the film which cast Ezra Miller from Zack Snyder’s films in the titular role, and based on the amazing Super Bowl trailer and hints of a story about the dangers of time travel and hopping through the multiverse, I was extremely confident that the film would do well.
It has turned out to be a top-notch flop for Warner Brothers Discovery, the studio that owns the DC superhero intellectual property containing Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. I was thinking that if the film did well, Warner would have some money for additional film projects, to include the possibility of maybe even finishing Zack’s quintet of movies and/or Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman trilogy. If the film did not do well, then Warner would continue to be in a rather dismal state financially, and perhaps they’d be more amenable to lending out their DC superhero IP to other studios and services such as Netflix, and perhaps the remaining unmade Snyderverse movies could be produced by someone other than Warner.
So in a nutshell, I’m telling you that the release of the Flash movie was a primary motivator to get to LA on the quick, and admittedly before my head was screwed on straight again. I can’t resist throwing out an oddball observation I made about the film’s release date that came to me by way of a penchant I have for superstition, particularly numerology.
So it seemed in coming to LA that the entire city was covered in posters and billboards for the Flash. David Zaslav, the president and CEO of WBD (Warner Brothgers Discovery) said personally that the movie was one of the greatest superhero movies of all time. This movie was being hyped beyond all beyonds. I thought it wasn’t a bad film by any means, though I personally saw it as far, far short of the greatest of all superhero movies.
I couldn’t help but ask myself, however, if the release date of the film itself could have been somehow some sort of mystical portion of the campaign to promote the film. See, June 16 can also be written 6/16, and 616 is actually a pretty significant number. See, in the book of Revelations, the mark of the beast is 666, a number which most are familiar with in popular culture and the many conclusions drawn by the Evangelical Christian community, which has connected the number to anything from bar code construction to COVID vaccinations.
Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name. This calls for wisdom: let the one who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and his number is 666.
Revelation 13:16-18
Over the millennia everybody and their brother has tried to come up with what this number is supposed to mean. One of the most enduring is that it is a reference to the Roman Emperor Nero, who was a notorious persecutor of Jews and Christians among many other unseemly traits. See, in the ancient world, numbers were represented by letters. This practice gave rise to the Jewish practice of gematria, which many may be familiar with through the Bible Code phenomenon from the 90s.
So in Greek, Nero Caesar would be rendered Νέρων Καῖσαρ (Neron Kaisar). The “n” on the end is important, as that form of the name ending in “n” ended up being transliterated into Hebrew as נרון קסר. So the numerical value of that name in Hebrew is: נ = 50, ר = 200, ו = 6, נ = 50, ק = 100, ס = 60, ר = 200 for a grand total of, you guessed it Wilson, 666. This is not a definitive answer to the meaning, as all sorts of people have come up with all sorts of interpretations, but this is a popular one of solid academic footing that I thought to include to give an idea of this sort of numerological thinking.
But what is interesting is is that there was an alternate number in place of 666 in that verse in Revelation in several manuscripts, most notably the P115 fragment from the Oxyrhynchus collection. In those manuscripts, the number is 616. Again, there has been a mountain of conjecture as to what this number could mean. I’ll show you the fragment.
Likewise, there has been no end to speculation about what this number could mean. The number is rendered in the Greek by the letters chi, iota, sigma. One particularly clever interpretation is that these letters can be arranged as a kind of mirror image of the famed Chi Rho symbol that Emperor Constantine used as the symbol of his Christian empire. The Chi Rho itself is a reference to the name Christos, the Greek word for the Messiah.
I found a cool diagram of how the letters chi, iota, sigma can be arranged into a mirror image of this symbol.
All this, Wilson, is basically to show you that these numbers, 666 and 616, are steeped in ancient numerology and semiotics, and that the famous 666 is also accompanied by a lesser known number of the beast: 616.
It’s also interesting to note that Earth-616 is the name for the primary continuity of the world of Marvel Comics. Nice little coincidence, right, Wilson? Carl Jung would be proud. I wonder what Joseph Campbell would make of it.
So the most hyped up DC movie of the year was released on 6/16, which happens to be the number of the world of Marvel Comics, and is also an alternate number associated with the Antichrist. These observations came to me as I try to return to a rational thought process following the otherworldly mindset that I fell into on the exhausting, stressful, and triggering trip around the world that I took on the way to Israel, and subsequently on the way to the AFSP Snydercon that I missed at the end of April. Are these observations rational and sane? No, they are not. But they aren’t exactly random mental gobblygook either. I’d call them rather curious, if I had to ascribe to them a term, especially since I had been griping on the Reddit for months about how the biblical basis of the themes of the Snyderverse movies seemed to be quashed by a hostile entertainment media engine and an influx of Marvel fans wanting a different type of DC superhero movie experience, presumably one that was more like Marvel, and even involved the entrance of a vaunted Marvel director to helm the DC superhero movie slate going forward.
Wilson, in the opening chapters of my book, written in 2020, I complain that the experiences I encountered in 2019 left me with a deep confusion as to the difference between illumination into the secrets of supernal mysteries and garden variety insanity. As of today, dude, I still have this problem. I spoke about the proverbial “mad prophet,” who for some, in some senses, is a fount of wisdom, and for others, in other senses, is just a madman. I still wish I knew which category I fit into.
So yeah, I am still seeing strange patterns underlying the things I see in these movie matters, and this has me thinking about whether I am still suffering bizarre cases of the apophenia I mentioned in my book, or if there is something to what I am seeing.
So the Flash has turned out to be a financial failure, though I was sure it would be a blockbuster. If there is any prophecy going on here, it certainly isn’t the predicting the future variety, LOL. But maybe I could be participating in some kind of pattern of activity with some sort of meaning that I am only partially aware of, but that I or others can find meaning in if they are so inspired. And with this in mind, I want to point out a few things that popped up in my writings that have turned out to be rather interesting when looked at with the benefit of hindsight.
For instance, this whole Wilson Saga that I have been writing to you basically starts with the blog post, The Superhero, the Butterfly, the Prophet, and the Witch. In that post I had an encounter with a fortune teller who told me that if I left the comforts of family to undertake some holy mission to Israel things would get tough for me. When you look at my subsequent cataloguing of my adventures bicycling to Israel, I think you can see that that things got difficult. Everything was great in the Iberian Peninsula, but starting at Rome, synchronistic events started to go off the scale, and the riding started to get tough, and even dangerous. When I hit the border of Israel, the coin came up tails 100 out of 100 times, with every sort of bizarre road block and calamity possible thwarting me from entering that country, not the least of which was a near total loss of intellectual and emotional stability. My ever degrading ability to comprehend the use of electronic devices reached such a nadir that I became convinced that some sort of evil large language model was haunting my tablet and cell phones, exemplified in the post I wrote about Tinder refusing to put me in contact with anyone at all in the country, and also my friend (?) Liat’s utter unwillingness to have a phone conversation with me, and a host of other bizarre goings on that one would expect to afflict someone in the throes of schizophrenic delusion, and, well, you have the blog posts to look at, Wilson. I mean, at least I have some ideas about a dystopian horror robot apocalypse movie to pitch to any such producer who may at some point cross my path here in LA.
Interestingly, it wasn’t mere hardship that afflicted me. The last post I wrote chronicling my rides to the Holy Land was from my trip to Mount Nebo, where Moses gave his last speech to the nation of Israel and then died. With that post I wanted to make a statement about whether I would be ending my journey overlooking the Holy Land or if I would enter – whether I was on a holy mission or not. Or if I was on a holy mission, would it succeed or not. I threw on the post the opening verses of the 63rd chapter of Isaiah. There is a common Jewish understanding that these verses speak of a character called “Messiah ben Joseph.” He is one of the “four craftsmen” of Jewish legend, who along with the Righteous Priest and Elijah forms a cadre of harbingers of the end times in advance of the coming of Messiah ben David, who is the final King Messiah of Jewish Tradition and who corresponds to Jesus the Messiah in the New Testament. I’d long been fascinated with these characters really ever since I’d taken John the Baptist as my patron saint during my days with Anglicanism. John is a New Testament analog to Elijah, a herald of the coming Messiah. Really I just threw that chapter on the post as a nod to the validity of an eschatological mission, but one verse there really catches my eye as I look at it in retrospect.
I looked, but there was no one to help;
Isaiah 63:5
I was appalled, but there was no one to uphold; so my own arm brought me salvation, and my wrath upheld me.
Yeah, Wilson, tucked into that chapter that is interpreted to be about a herald of the apocalypse there is the verse about the guy being left alone and hung out to dry. Now hold that thought for just a second. See, not long after, as I started to encounter these strange difficulties entering Israel, I wrote a whiny little set of lines in which I complained that I couldn’t get anyone to draw or paint a book cover that I had been wanting to put on my book. There was a chick at the Battuta hostel, Ida Clade, who was working there and had been beautifying the place with several drawings. I offered to get her some art supplies if she would paint me a book cover. She initially expressed interest, but I suppose that due to my incredible karmic calamity that seems to accompany my dealings with women, the project fell through in an awkward and uncomfortable way. I had asked for help with that, and even offered to pay a half dozen people to help with that book cover, to no avail to this day.
So upon arrival in Jordan I had been complaining about not being able to get any help. Well, as it turns out, the whole three-month episode in Jordan was a spectacular display of a guy not getting any help whatsoever. It’s like I prophesied my own abandonment with those verses and with that poem, but I had no idea I was prophesying anything. I was just complaining about nobody helping me. But it happened. Nobody helped me in one of the grandest episodes of not being helped that I’ve ever heard of.
So, a fortune teller told me things would get difficult, and they did, and I was putting up bible verses and poetry about not being able to get any help, and I got no help. I mean, I really spectacularly got no help. In the most bizarre violation of the law of probability that I can describe. It’s there in the posts, Wilson. I didn’t make any prophetic predictions. I really didn’t know what to expect, but a pattern developed, and my fears and expectations seemed to come true, really without my having any knowledge that I was prophesying anything. No, Wilson, I don’t know what to make of it. I’ll say the whole thing rings not of having some sort of knowledge of the future, but rather of being a participant in some kind of a pattern.
I’ll have more to say about that trip some day, Wilson. At the moment I am concentrating on other things and allowing hindsight to give me better and more relevant perspectives about the significance of everything. Now the last thing I want to mention are some observations about the present. So I am here in LA to do Justice League stuff. Superheroes and actors and directors and all. I’ve noticed a number of connections between me and my life and some of the people I’ve been thinking about as of late. Let me run some things by you.
Zack Snyder: I’ve already written some crazed posts about this guy, such as his calling a Snydercon after being silent for the longest time just after I had been campaigning on the Reddit for another Snydercon, and his references to a number of the great people who worked with him and for him just after I had been complaining that I needed a job. There are actually a lot of those things that I could mention, but really, doing so reminds me of one of my soldiers in Iraq who was convinced that he was the reincarnation of Ronnie van Zant from Lynyrd Skynrd. Everything that kid saw in everything somehow connected to Ronnie van Zant. It really is amazing how the mind can tie everything together, and I have no doubt something like that was happening to me, so I will cool it with a lot of those observations. I will point out the thing that I just wrote about recently, though, that I dearly love a young Asian woman, like an adopted niece or daughter, and I just recently came to a point where I don’t think my daughter or I are going to see our dear Chloe again. That’s the family drama that I was dealing with as I came to LA, and I just couldn’t help but thinking that the guy at the center of this leg of my journey lost his adopted Asian daughter to suicide. That’s just one thing, but I will leave it there as an example of this connection of patterns.
Gal Gadot: This will be a short paragraph, Wilson. I only need to say that I have this thing about Israel, holy mission as you will, or divine calling or whatever, and lo and behold, Wonder Woman is Israeli. In itself this wouldn’t mean much, but along with everything else, it fits right in. I even attempted an initial inquiry about working for her in Israel. So, guy with a thing for Israel comes to LA to do stuff pertaining to the movies of an Israeli Wonder Woman.
Ezra Miller: Now this might be the most interesting connection of the bunch. You do remember me writing a book that contained a tragic story of myself as a guy who went off the deep end in a meth-fueled catastrophe with the devil subsequent to accusations of impropriety surrounding talking to a teenaged (but legal adult) girl. That story contained a number of indications that for all of being a celibate Anglican monk at the time, I am absolutely capable of participating in pervy adventures, and my tango with the forces of darkness involved serious spiritual attacks on the fundaments of my identity as a person, not the least of which was my sense of my age and gender. Enter Ezra Miller, a young and adventurous actor who was relentlessly and mercilessly labeled as a pedophile and child groomer in the entertainment media for his relationship with a legal adult teenaged girl, and who was pilloried as a cult leader for comparing his character, the Flash, to Jesus. Yeah, this guy should read my book. We could have some interesting conversations.
Ray Fisher: Now I just saw this guy in the play Fetch Clay, Make Man at the Kirk Douglas Theater. He gave a fantastic performance of Muhammad Ali. He is of course most famous for playing Cyborg in Zack Snyder’s movies, and still works with Zack, with a part in the upcoming Rebel Moon that Zack will have on Netflix this December. Along with his acting credits, Ray is also famous for an incredibly high profile public blowout he had with Walter Hamada, then CEO of DC Films, in which he accused Hamada of racism among other failings and refused to work with Hamada under any circumstances. Now about me, I’ll say that Jonathan Bailey comes pre-cancelled. I have ten years of utterly bombastic social media postings where I have said pretty much every foul things a person can say. I wrote a book about myself doing the most foolish things a human can do. I might even say I’m not done. I have an absolutely acidic blog post in mind about another issue ongoing in my life that I am only holding off on at the moment because as I come to LA with the intention of actually meeting people, making friends, and working with and for people who have public reputations to protect, I don’t want a current blog post on my feed of me diming people out and saying bad things about people. Believe it or not, I am actually wanting to present myself as trustworthy with people’s secrets and respectful of their reputations. But that’s not my history, and Ray and I could probably have an interesting conversation about what public tirades do. Not that I don’t sympathize with Ray, but when all that was going on with him and Hamada, I couldn’t help but think, “that’s just so Jonathan Bailey.”
Henry Cavill: I’m not going to say too much about this guy other than that I was once a huge Eve Online blogger (Cavill is said to love the game), that if he has creative differences with his female showrunner, he gets accused of not being able to work with women, and that he has caught hell for dating younger women before and for espousing a classic masculine view that a woman should be chased.
The Rest: Yeah, I could point out interesting observations about Ben Affleck and Jason Momoa too, but as I mentioned in my paragraph about Zack, drawing too many connections seems tendentious and contrived, and I don’t want to string everything together into a narrative not unlike my soldier who thought he was Ronnie van Zant.
I’ll just say that with the biggies in this list, The Israeli Wonder Woman, the spiritual adventurer lambasted as pedophile, the public blowout with the Hollywood chieftain, and the Superman who hates all women except the teenagers he dates, I’ve seen a commonality of spirit between myself and these Justice Leaguers.
All in all, things are downright dreamlike, Wilson. I mentioned in a previous post that I feel like I am swimming around in a soup of symbolism and patterns, seeing connections between the Marvel Universe, Flash’s release date, and the Mark of the Beast on the one hand, and that my trip to Israel that seems to involve the unfolding of prophetic patterns even though I wasn’t prophesying anything, and a strong sense of commonality with the filmmakers behind these movies that I have come to LA to champion. Really, it’s all like a dream.
This image above might ring to many servants of God, Abrahamic theist types, like sorcery or occultism, and there are a great many contexts to be wary of unrestrained thinking of this type. However, when I look at this image, I see something more akin to the biblical verse below.
When the LORD restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream.
Psalm 126:1
For what it’s worth, I seem to be getting along fine with my new roommates, I’m riding my bike around LA without dying, and although I am thinking my recovery is slow, and my productivity is subpar, I definitely have a sense that I am at least superficially on the way to being a normative, balanced, rational adult. From there, however, all of these symbols and patterns are jumping out at me, making me think something powerful is afoot.
So, Wilson, I don’t think I’m completely done with the leg of my journey that I took with you around the world, but it’s going to take some time before I get back to you with the final conclusion. I am going to be writing some other things for a while. So in the interim, you take care of yourself, okay? I’ll be in touch eventually.
שבוע טוב