In 2019, the movie "Pachamama" made it's appareance in Netflix. Appart from being anti-colonialist trauma based mind control, Pachamama is the most pagan movie yet made. Two small indians need to rescue their golden-egg pachamama idol from conquerors or everything will face extinction. Other films have pagan ideas interwined into important plot points, and albeit they are more subtle, it is good to review them.
Some may claim that the messages are actually offensive to the mentality of the pagans (cultural appropiation). However, this films do give paganism a nicer look. Catholics believe pagan gods are literally devils, but Hollywood makes them look like yet another harmless cartoon character. This means that even if these films don't promote the worship or respect to pagan idols, they do teach that they are just cool myths that gave meaning to the lives of people and you can use in your own secular story telling, not devils who deceived people for Hell's sake.
Another pagan stuff common in films is pantheism, the belief that God is one with the creatures He made, or that there is some sort of divine energy flowing withing everything. Plus, the popularity of esoteric beliefs (kabbalah, gnosticism, teosophy) means some films will even be full of actual occultism.
Movies With Blatant Pagan Messages:
Kung Fu Panda
I was surprised when I noticed how much of the film was based around real Kung Fu. While not intrinsically evil as a sport, the spirituality found in Kung Fu is essentially buddhist
It was made by Bodhidarma, a budhist monk born in India who later travelled to China. He taught Kung Fu as a form of moving meditation to the Shaolin monks. Various correlations between pagan chinese ideas and Kung Fu Panda are found. For Example:
1) Remember that I said Po, albeit a soyboyic, immature and obese bear, was somehow more powerfull than the Furious Five? Kung Fu Panda 3 explains why.
In the franchise Pandas have a special connection to Qi, a traditional chinese energy that dwells within living beings, and since Po is a panda, his connection to Qi allows him to be a champion without needing to lose weight. In the movie, Po bonds with the Qi of an ancient Warrior who was a dragon, and kills his enemy by overwhelming him with energy.
While the evil bull Kai absorbs the Qi of various Kung Fu masters to turn them into jade - zombies, Pandas use Chi energy to heal each other, and at the end, they channel it to help Po destroy the power hungry bovine.
2) Various references to the taoist Ying-Yang are found. In the second, a fortune reader (!) predicts the evil peacock Sheng will be defeated by "white and black" refering to a panda, as the Ying-Yang appears from her pot:
The idea of fate is also recurrent on this film
The same idea is implyed in the third. Evil is represented with green and good with gold. The warrior Oogway tells Po that pandas healed him with Qi in the past, and that his black-and-white colour reminded him of the ying-yang the first time he saw him. The ying-yang appears at the end as Po unleashes the full power of the dragon warrior.
Po later receives the Ying-Yang Staff from Oogway, and uses it to transport himself back to our world from the "spirit realm"
3) Bodhidarma allegedly invented various Kung Fu moves by observing animals. This tradition was later added in the movie with the characters Monkey, Tigress, Viper, Mantis and Stork, who represent differnt styles of Kung Fu. The Kung Fu Teacher itself is called Sifu, the traditional name for a Kung Fu teacher. Po's fighting style is the Kung Fu bear technique.
Avatar: The Last Airbender an its Spin-Off, Legend of Korra
The iconic Nickelodeon show is full of pagan fluff.
Its setting is a world in which 4 different nations have special contact with the 4 elements: water, fire, earth and air. Some of the civilians are able to "bend" and manipulate such elements at will. The producers inspired this fictional movements on real martial arts like Kung Fu and Tai Chi.
This is how the main characters "bend" their elements.
Avatar tells the story of a young boy, one Aang, who is the "avatar", the reincarnation of a being that can bend all four elements. Aang must stop the evil fire nation king from destroying all the others.
Moana and Pocahontas
Moana is literally about an "elected" young girl who travels with a demi-god to retrieve the heart of Te-Fiti, some sort of earth godess. And in the Toxic Environmentalism post, we mentioned why Pocahontas was pantheist.
Avatar (Film)
Avatar tells the story of Jake Sully, a quadriplegic marine that is sent to the moon of Pandora to research the natives of the place, the Nav'i Aliens, in order to peacefully retire them from the area to mine a precious metal. He is given a Nav'i body he can control in order to learn from them as an insider. Eventually he opens himself up to the culture and traditions of the natives and helps them to defend their godess, a three, from the marines who want to destroy it all.
Avatar is pretty full of pagan imagery as well as occultic imagery. Jake Sully learns to dominate and ride a red dragon named Toruk, who is some sort of divinity for the Nav'i. Only 5 people have been able to ride it. The name "avatar" itself is a sanscrit therm; it is used to refer to shiva's incarnations, the hindu version of the messias. This suggests that Jake Sully is some sort of incarnation of a divine being. He is betrayed and is about to be sacrificed by the Nav'i, but he is able to escape after being rescued - similar to Jesus, but not the same.
The Nav'i have a braid that allows them to connect to the three godess, this braid has been linked to the third eye of occult enlightenment. Jake Sully needs to enlighten himself to the traditions of the aliens, and eventually betrays his own race and unites all tribes against the human menace.
Movies in Which Pagan Stuff is Found in the Film
This movies, while not intrinsically pagan so to speak, (they don't really, to my eyes, tell me to became a pagan) don't really show an opposition to paganism per se, and some of its elements are represented like if nothing happened.
The Princess and The Frog
In the Princess and The Frog, the villain is a voodoo magician, but so is the benevolent witch that helps Tania and Naveen.
I mean, seriously, voodoo practices ritual demonic posession, but Mama Odie gets a pass because she sings a nice song?
Percy Jackson
Frozen 2
Similarly to "The Last Airbender", Elsa needs to join the 4 spirits of nature with humans. The spirits have abandoned humanity because there was a war between the Arendellians and the Northuldra (actually, it should read Norwegains and Sami, a scandinavian tribe). So now Elsa is the "fifth spirit" that will "unite the clans".
The queen's travel is rather messianic, she needs to domate the 4 elements and visit a glacier called Atohallan, which serves as some sort of Historical Archive for the magical Frozen world. Atohallan stores all knowledge, it is a place were "all is found". There, Elsa discovers that her grandfather wanted to genocide the Northuldra people because they had access to magic: he says magic prevents people from following the mandates of a King. The film has a strong imagery for finding hidden truth, a common gnostic trope, as the knowledge is achieved through magical practices.
Elsa answers that trouble raises from fear, not from magic. She later frozes after dwelling too deeply in Atohallan (so much for "cold never bothered me"), but when Ana destroys a damm built by the Arendellians she comes back from the dead. Is Elsa playing the "I-Am-Jesus" game like Anakin and Aslan? Yes, she is.
Gnosticism? The Following Franchises and Movies let you think a lot:
It's easier to fall for gnosticism than for paganism. While paganism is a collection of stupid myths and fables people told to each other in the past, and pagan idols are not all-mighty or even uncreated, and have not retaliated for not being worshipped in thousands of years, gnosticism offers smarter, more subtle and cooler religious experience. The following films and franchises are suspect or guilty of gnosticism:
A Series of Unfortunate Events
Written by Lemony Snicket, the last books have strong gnostic imagery. It tells the story of three children: Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire who are very smart but always face unfortunate events, as their evil uncle Count Olaf hunts them like a vociferous wolf.
In one of the books, they find an island ruled by a white-bearded cult leader named Ishmael, a pathethic figure obsessed with preventing his followers from eating certain fruit.The Baudelaires eventually learn that Ishmael has actually devoured the fruit to save himself from a plague that would kill the other cult followers. Sound familiar? Gnostics believe God was bad because he refused to let Adam and Eve consume the forbidden fruit, since it was actually harmless and would grant them knowledge.
X-Men: Apocalypse
It tells the story of a mutant, En Sabar Nuh (Apocalypse) who transfers his souls to other mutant bodies. He eventually has himself worshipped by various civilizations, and the movie characters heavily imply that all religions were inspired by this man.
It seems that Apocalypse was inspired on the gnostic demiurg, a god who is creator but since his creation is evil, is evil because he imprisons souls in creation. Apocalypse wants to destroy humanity because he thinks they are wasting their time in technology; this reminds us of the demiurg chosing to hide knowledge from humans. Different quotes from the film (eg; when Charles Xavier is told that the 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse were the inspiration for the Revelation) suggest En Sabar Nuh is God Himself.
In general, the Marvel, DC and X-Men franchises are full of pagan idols as characters.
The Golden Compass Trilogy
Anti-Theist Phillip Pullmann hates God so much, that he says "even if He existed, we would have to kill him". He inserts his propaganda in the trilogy of "The Golden Compass", full of caricatures of cristianity. The last book, titled "The Subtle Knife", his "Lord Azriel" will destroy God using the only weapon that "can kill him" - the subtle knife. Now pardon me, but I don't think this books are atheistic. I believe they are gnostic. There are two gods, one good, one bad, and to this gnostic stuff Pullmann chooses to add the destruction of one of them.
9 (Nine)
The bearer of ligth will come to cinema in 9-9-09
Nine is a film based on a short by Shane Acker. Nine is a very disturbing, creepy film, but the messages are so explicit that I thought it would be good to write about it.
A scientist creates machines that are able to create other machines from scrap. However, they turn against humans and eventually exterminate all living beings on earth. The creator of such machines passed 9 aspects of his human soul to 9 ragdolls. This is an alchemical practice known as the homonculi, creating small beings from scrap. The jewish Talmud also refers to animating non-living materials. This creatures are known as golems, and they are a blatant copy-paste of the creation.
The characters read a book called "Anuli Paracelsus", in which the process of making homunculi is shown:
Paracelsus was a renowned physician and alchemist.
There is one character, 1, who looks like a Pope or Bishop. In fact, he has an unncany resemblance to Pope Pius XII. Behold:
One is rigid and closed, he hides on an abandoned Cathedral together with other dolls. He doesn't want the others to read Paracelsus, and is opposed by 9 as well as 7, 4 and 3. He claims that he wants to protect the others, however, he never seeks to destroy the machines, unlike 9. It is obvious who One is supposed to represent. One later sacrifices himself so that Nine can save the day.
Most dolls die after the machine leader sucks their souls out of their bodies. 9 delivers their souls from imprisonment in it by making a ritual. He burns the bodies together forming a 5-pointed star and their souls are freed.
But they wouldn't be freed if it wasn't because of a talisman, that 6 draws in here:
The Wizard of Oz
Few people know that Frank Baum, the writer of the Wizard of Oz. was a member of the theosophical society. The Wizard of Oz also has a significant number of sequels and many adaptations appart from The classical technicolor musical.
The story talks about a Kansas native girl named Dorothy. Doroth is absorbed by a tornado into a magical land called Oz. She is told that she needs to visit the Wizard of Oz in order to go back home, and in her travel she is joined by a Scarecrow who wants a brain, a Tinman who wants a heart and a Lion who wants courage. The Wizard tolds them to first defeat the evil Witch of the West and then he would grant them wishes. But when the mission has been achieved, they discover the wizard is a fraud.
However, his deception does not keep him from attempting to give each character something simbolically similar to what they want. Dorothy is able to go back home since her magickal shoes, which she has been donning from the beginning bring her back to Kansas.
Since Theosophists believe that each human is innerly divine, it makes perfect sense that Dorothy had the power to go back home by herself since she came to Oz. The same can be said of the other characters, for example, in the classical film the Lion saves Dorothy corageously from the witch and the scarecrow makes a rescue plan despite being brainless.
While most stories in the past only had evil witches, Oz introduces us to Glinda, the "good witch" of the North.
Also, some people have noticed that the description of Oz (an emerald city with golden (yellow) brick roads) is similar to the description of Heaven, indicating that the wizard is metaphor for the Christian God.
Baum claimed the story "came to him out of the blue". What else could have came out of the blue? The creepy Disney sequel "Return of Oz":
Screwed
Finaly, it is interesting to notice that some of the characters are animated objects, just like Nine's homunculi. There is a scarecrow, a tinman, a horse made out of wood and a pumpkin head man.
CONCLUSION
You can prevent your children from Hollywood and Co. But the truth is that your efforts will be invalid if you don't make sure they learn catholic doctrine and apologetics. That's why I recommend the Catholic Archivist, a blog that regularly puts out links and downloadable PDF's of Catholic Books; many of them are about apologetics and I hope he publishes against paganism as well. Julian the Apostate didn't have Disney, or Marvel, or even a TV, but that didn't kept him from becoming... well, an apostate who most probably went to hell.
And meanwhile, I don't expect the pagan idols to exterminate me for exposing their subtle traps. They must be sleeping.
Links
Avatar the Last Airbender Fandom
Frozen 2 in Tradition in Action and IMDB
Millsones on the Road 5: Toxic Environmentalism
A movie review of Avatar (film) by an argentinian semi-trad
Vigilant Citizen Article on Nine (carefull, there are disturbing articles and pictures of celebrities in this website - I would recommend you to skip the comment section too.)
A Series of Unfortunate Events Fandom
Golden Compass (protestant website)
I saw a little bit of one of the Percy Jackson movies recently, just out of curiosity, but it was boring. Pagan stuff doesn't interest me anyway.
ReplyDeleteI admit I liked the "A Series Of Unfortunate Events" movie (fairly humourous) though I did note the symbolism of the "friendly snake/viper". This does not have to symbolize that other serpent - but it's a minor point. Quirky movie...Once I read the last book in the series, and -there- one can see a lot more unfortunate symbolism.
I didn't see any of the others, but I remember back in the day reading about the books "The Golden Compass" was based on and hoping it would bomb, which it did. So that was nice.