psychoceramics: Mormon Comedy and the Mason/UFO Connection (fwd)

[acb @ cs.monash.edu.au (Andrew C. Bulhak)]

----- Forwarded message from Hal Davis -----

To: silent-t--@w--.std.com
From: hdavis @ ljextra.com (Hal Davis)
Subject: Mormon Comedy and the Mason/UFO Connection


from, "Love is the Plan, the Plan is What? Eight Views of _Plan 10 from
Outer Space_, "  a 1995 film by Trent Harris;  from the  the view by  Ariel
Hameon: "Mormon Comedy and the Mason/UFO Connection," in _The New York
Review of Science Fiction_, January 1996:

[all typos mine]
...
What Plan 10 actually reveals is a deep, insidious feminist plot to rule
the world involving UFO abductions, Masonic ritual, and bees. (Very
important, those bees.) This is where _Plan 10_ goes off the deep end and
on to my list of favorite paranoid conspiracy theories. Because many of the
details are accurate, I found _Plan 10_'s plot to be as compelling a
conspiracy as those presented in _The Gods of Eden_, _Holy Blood, Holy
Grail_, the _Illuminatus!_ trilogy, and _Cosmic Trigger_, to name a few of
this field's standard texts. Never mind that _Plan 10_ plays its subject
matter purely for laughs -- I swear someone, somewhere is going to flip and
turn into a true believer. After all, UFOs, angels, conspiracies, religious
sects with strange views and political power, the Goddess returning, and
the apocalypse too. Ain't this the stuff of life at the end of the
twentieth century?

What holds the true believers' faith intact is the proliferation of details
that provides the supposed "proof." And _Plan 10_ contains lots of details.
F'rinstance, the bees. _Plan 10_'s single, side-splitting production number
is the Dance of the Bees, performed to the tune of the actual Mormon hymn,
"If You Could Hie to Kolob" (the planet Kolob, that is). The dance is made
up of  various Masonic postures, including the sign of the entered
apprentice, the heave-over, the sign of the past-Master (yeah, I do just
happen to have a copy of _Duncan's Rituals of Freemasonry_  lying  around).
More interesting is that the Dance of the Bees invokes the aliens (who come
in a UFO right out of Ezekiel 1:4-23) -- now we're into ritual magic
territory. There is a stream of occult belief that regards the
Masonic-based rituals of groups like the Ordo Templi Orientis (Crowley was
quite involved with this crew) as methods of contacting the Secret Masters
who are, *gasp!*, aliens. George Andrews writes in _Extraterrestrial
Friends of Foes_ that Jack Parsons, rocket scientist and magickal son of
Uncle Aleister hisself, let the evil Grey aliens onto this plane by
performing the BABALON ritual. _Plan 10_ may be  joking, but we live in
interesting times. If you're going to play lifestyle fantasy, play hard.
...
Trent Harris knows not what he has wrought. He's down with angels, aliens,
and occultists, whether he believes in it or not. And, I think it's very
important to note here, it doesn't matter one bit if he doesn't believe it.
He's provided the new bottle for a particularly twentieth-century brand of
wine, the Masonic/UFO/world domination cult. I expect to see true believers
everywhere turn up any minute now on alt.alien.visitors and alt.
conspiracy: "Get _Plan 10 from Outer Space_. It explains everything."




----- End of forwarded message from Hal Davis -----

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