We watched this gem of a film on Netflix last night. I knew from the opening sequence (above) that it would be amusing, to say the least. The culture clash between America and Saudi Arabia is quite extreme and Tom Hanks’ character is definitely a fish out of water. But over the course of a couple of hours, he learns to navigate the shark infested world of business in a place where tomorrow might never come.
There was a quip that Alan makes partway through his longish sojourn in the Kingdom: when asked if he was alright, after receiving some medical attention, he says, “They would need a golden bullet.”
This allusion to Lawrence of Arabia is a hint that, like T.E. Lawrence, he would finally find himself there.
In the beginning, I thought it was going to be a comedy of errors, human foibles, and culture differences. By the end, I realized it was a stylized romantic adventure.
If you like Tom Hanks, you will enjoy this pilgrim’s progress.
I’ve had this book since 2013 (before I started writing these blogs). I’ve alluded to it several times, most specifically to suggest that someone from the future went back to the past to impart the first five books of the Old Testament to Moses. Why? To show us that everything is known, and has been since the beginning of time. The opening chapter explains it better than I can.
Chapter One: The Ancient Legend
‘This book is the story of what may turn out to be the most important scientific research ever undertaken. The research began long ago as the speculations of mystics, but ended as science of the highest caliber. The reality it hints at encompasses both.
‘The story begins with an ancient and mysterious tradition among the Jews concerning the Torah — the first five books of the Bible, which form the core of Judaism, and are sacred to Christians and Muslims as well. This tradition claims that, unlike all other books of Scripture — and unlike any other sacred text from anywhere else in the world, at any time — the Torah alone was not merely inspired, it was dictated directly by God to Moses in a precise letter-by-letter sequence.
‘Entirely forgotten by the larger world, this strange tradition is not widely known nowadays even among Jews. Yet for many of those learned in Judaism and faithful to its tenets, the strict veracity of such claims is not in doubt. They maintain, to this day, that the legend of letter-by-letter transmission of the Torah was passed down by word of mouth for millennia, from the time of the actual event, precisely fifty days after the Exodus from Egypt. Only much later was the claim committed to writing.
‘And there is more. It is also said that into the precise sequence of letters, there is encrypted information of a sort that only a divine hand could have placed there. That is why so unusual a method of transmission was required.
‘However quaint or absurd it must surely seem, this tradition has an illustrious and surprising “provenance.” One of the greatest leaders and thinkers in all of Jewish history was a prominent eighteenth century Lithuanian rabbi, Elijah Solomon (in Hebrew, Eliyahu ben Shlomo) known reverently as “the Great One of Vilna” — the Vilna Gaon. As has often been the case with the great leaders of the Jews ever since the Roman exile, the Gaon was a child prodigy in Talmud, having memorized every one of its millions of words. But he was equally accomplished in mathematics. Furthermore, he was a rationalist par excellence and implacably hostile to unrestrained mystical enthusiasms of every sort.
‘Nonetheless, in a cryptic aside in one of his many brilliant books, he made the following startling claim: “All that was, is, and will be unto the end of time is included in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible.” Nor by this claim was the Gaon merely indulging in poetic hyperbole of the sort commonplace in religious writing. This greatest of Jewish rationalists meant it absolutely literally — and he took pains to make his point unmistakably clear: “. . . and not merely in a general sense, but including the details of every person individually, and the most minute details of everything that happened to him from the day of his birth until his death; likewise of every kind of animal and beast and living thing that exists, and of herbage, and of all that grows or is inert.”‘ (pages 1-2)
Conclusion
The adherents of Islam will often say, “It is written…”
We are beginning to recognize that everything is connected. The transmission of the text has a warning attached to it:
‘In fact, Bible scholars have long been aware that over the millennia, the Torah has been preserved with an amazingly small number of letter-level variations. Though not 100 percent perfect, this precision of transmission is of such a high order (especially by contrast with other ancient texts, including others within the Hebrew Scriptures) that it has long been a puzzle to scholars.
‘The puzzle lies not in the method that allows such precision — that is well-known — but in the reason for such attention. To this very day, every Torah scroll of the kind that may be found in any synagogue the world over is copied by hand from its predecessor, written out according to unchanging rules, by scribes who undergo an exacting course of training and preparation. To each of them, the following warning has been passed down through the ages — we should hear it as more than a poetic metaphor: “Should you perchance omit or add one single letter from the Torah, you would thereby destroy all the universe.”‘ (page 4)
That makes this saying of Jesus more understandable:
This thought has been circling the internet for a few years now, so I cannot take any credit for its truth. When I posted the article about Hannibal Barca, I had in the back of my mind the idea that Patton was his reincarnation. But does that stand up to scrutiny?
If you compare this image of Patton with the statue of Hannibal, you can instantly see the similarities. That’s one of the criteria for ‘proof’. The other is astrology.
It’s that Yod pointing at Patton’s Ascendant that makes me sit up and take notice, but the fact that the Sun and the Moon are doing the pointing means that the effect is doubled if not tripled. He has a Gemini spirit, for sure. The Moon is in Capricorn (hard-hearted) and the Sun is in Scorpio (deep retribution). He couldn’t be anything but ‘blood and guts’, could he?
But there are other inconjuncts: Mercury and Saturn; Venus and Pluto; and Jupiter and the Midheaven. He definitely was carrying a load of heavy chips on his shoulder. But as long as he was doing his ‘job’, he was finishing what he set out to do: defeat Rome.
And the irony is that he had to join the new Roman Army (American armed forces) to do it.
Comparing the Charts
As we learned years ago, the 9th House cusp of the older chart needs a trigger planet from the newer chart to show the connection between them. Patton’s Saturn is the ‘proof’. And Patton’s Ascendant is conjunct Hannibal’s Sun. This is powerful, indeed.
The other links are just as telling: Patton’s Mercury is conjunct Hannibal’s Jupiter; the North Node in each chart is conjunct the South Node in the other; Patton’s Jupiter is conjunct Hannibal’s Moon; and Patton’s Moon is conjunct Hannibal’s Saturn. We have liftoff.
If you still have a skeptical mind about this, please note that it has been suggested that Donald Trump is the reincarnation of George Patton. I think that’s a bit of a stretch.
There is a scene in this film where Winston Churchill seems to be the only one who is willing to fight the onslaught of the German Blitzkrieg. Everyone else in the War Cabinet is looking to surrender to Hitler in order to save their trapped soldiers at Dunkirk. You could see that Churchill was trying to buy time until Operation Dynamo (the flotilla of small boats) was launched to bring the 300,000 soldiers back home. But he was on his own, single-handedly looking for answers. In truth, the Conservatives were trying to find a way to get him out of No. 10 Downing Street. They just were hoping that he would paint himself into a corner that he couldn’t get out of.
Sound familiar?
His wife, Clementine, was probably the only one who could have seen him through this crisis, as this next clip clearly shows:
On his way to that War Cabinet meeting, Churchill decides to take a ride on the Underground (something he had never done in his life before).
After this, he decides to seek the opinions of other Conservative members at Westminster:
After seeing that he was not alone in his wish to stand up to Hitler and ‘never surrender’, he went to the House of Commons, and gives the speech of his lifetime:
We got word yesterday that a valued member of our Faith & Science group was in hospital about to undergo a heart bypass operation after suffering from a heart attack two days before.
It was suggested that we link up at 1:00 pm and think good thoughts for our friend.
As I know the power of healing prayer, I also know that our collective thoughts would be a very effective way of helping our friend to meet whatever challenges were coming his way.
I watched episode five of “Messiah” last night. It was the one entitled “So That Seeing They May Not See”. (All the episode titles have vaguely spiritual/mystical meanings to them.) I think this would have been better suited as the title of episode six, when al-Mesih walks on water in Washington, DC. But I digress.
Our expectations are the reason we see what we see, and believe what we believe.
But we may be fooling ourselves in the process.
The people had gathered at the scene of the tornado, hoping to get close to this miracle worker. Each had their special needs, but mostly they all really just wanted was to witness whatever he does next.
What they did not expect was his using a rifle to put a dog out of its misery. What!?
A man of God wouldn’t kill anything, would he?
They were hoping for a miracle. They were hoping he’d heal it. Oops.
Then, in episode six, they go on a journey with no clear destination. In the end, they end up at the nation’s capital.
He Asks the Crowd to Look Around Them at Their World
By the time the whole convoy of followers arrive at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, they are primed for ‘something, anything’ to happen.
The Word suggests that each person look at his neighbour, to see the mirror of their thinking. He them challenges by saying, “What you see, will be your choosing.”
Then he steps to the edge of the water.
And that is entirely the point of this whole series: is he the ‘real’ thing or is he a ‘fake’?
I’m always on the lookout for exceptional people to identify and analyze astrologically. Hannibal was a legend in his own time. But what made him the way he was?
The birth time is randomized, but I think it’s accurate, at least for our purposes. Mars is just about where it should be when he took over as Commander-in-Chief at age 25. That would make his Rising sign Scorpio, which is probably why we know so little about him.
When I drew up the Battle of Cannae chart, the pivotal planet was Saturn. I think this explains his character and effect on his troops: he was a younger version of his father, Hamilcar. If anything, he was his father’s son and heir in battle and in life. (The legends of him swearing an oath [under duress?] to his father that he would never be a friend of Rome are an indication of this: at the time he was just a boy, and he wanted to go with his father into battle on the Iberian peninsula.) At any rate, he certainly exceeded all expectations, even though he didn’t win the 2nd Punic War against Rome.
There are two inconjuncts, and I feel they explain far more than anything else does:
Sun Inconjunct Saturn
You will have to learn the difference between having self-control and discipline, on one hand, and totally denying yourself and self-expression, on the other. This aspect can mean that you feel extremely unworthy, which undermines your self-confidence and makes it hard to face obstacles in life with confidence and determination.
Uranus Inconjunct Pluto
This aspect indicates changes in the world of the people who were born at these times, changes that were difficult to understand because they were very revolutionary but subtle in many ways. The people born [in the 19th century] during the first period [1892-1894] experienced the consequences of these changes through having to fight in the First World War. The second group [1911-1912] reached maturity at the time of the Great Depression. Both the First World War and the Depression were expressions of the breakdown of the nineteenth-century world order that was dominated by Western Europe.
These inconjuncts are the reason that Hannibal’s battle strategy dictated how campaigns of war were to be fought, until the First World War, when everything changed.
And instead of committing suicide by his own sword, he swallowed poison: very Scorpio Ascendant, in my opinion. He was 65 years old.
History, eh? We may find it boring, but there are always moments in time when the impossible happens, and the whole concept of military warfare gets turned on its head.
And so it is with this ancient Roman battle against an invasion by Hannibal Barca and his Carthaginian cohorts. Who can forget the image of elephants crossing the alps?
In short, by enticing the overly confident, physically superior, Roman army into striking at his weaker middle ranks, and then, employing what we now call a ‘pincer’ movement, surrounding the whole battle formation and then slaughtering them. It was the worse loss of human life on the battlefield up to that point in time, equivalent to all the American soldiers killed during the Vietnam War.
The Chart
The pivotal planet is Saturn, in Aquarius in the 5th House. (The timing is considered the ‘normal’ start of any battle, not at dawn, but after breakfast. An army doesn’t do very well on an empty stomach.) All the planets except Saturn are on the Eastern side of the chart. At the dividing line, Pluto is opposite the Midheaven. And Saturn is inconjunct to the Ascendant. This chart has a ‘fated’ feel to it.
I won’t try to parse the aspects, but suffice it to say that Rome didn’t expect their enemy to walk up to the gates of the city and knock so loudly on their door.
