Tag: Mythology

Atlantis Giants in Butler County Ohio: The Hilltop Earthwork of the Constellation Aries at Pyramid Hill, from 5000 years ago

I can’t tell you how happy I was to walk into the office at Pyramid Hill as I was asking about the status of the project that has been going on for a few years now and to get the look of concealment that I did. The workers that day were young people who weren’t sure how to answer the question, so they referred me to the Ancient Sculpture Museum, which is concealed deep in the woods down a large hill in a place that feels like it’s not even on this earth. It’s one of those little secrets in Butler County, Ohio, and is a treasure within a treasure. Noticing their cryptic reference, my wife and I proceeded to the museum and stepped into the first room and noticed immediately that finally, since 1836, when the site was first surveyed, finally the Butler County Hilltop Work was getting the attention it has always deserved. I’ve looked at that strange mound, which is around 250 ft tall and sits across from Joe Nuxhall Way on the west side of the Great Miami River, about 3 miles from downtown Hamilton, and always marveled at it. The museum staff already had an excellent display set up for an early 2023 opening that will connect the Pyramid Hill complex to this new massive ancient mound they plan to call the Fortified Hill. Sounds better than Butler County Hilltop Work. The staff person on hand that day told my wife and me that they were planning to open everything in January of 2023 if everything went well, which explained the cryptic looks at the main office when I mentioned it. There are very few people in the world who even know that the strange hill that looms large in Butler County, with thousands and thousands of people living around it, and driving by it every day, that it’s one of the most mysterious lost, ancient works of an advanced culture on earth. And yet, it’s been there before Christ was born as if dated celestially; it’s around 5000 years old. 

What makes it so exceptional in the world is that it essentially is dedicated to the constellation Aries that through stellar precession, shows a specific movement from the constellation Taurus through the Pleiades and into the age of Aries at a time when we have previously thought only of Indians marching in a steady stream toward civilization from hunters and gatherers and into city dwelling humans. I’m not one to disparage scientists, even the bureaucratic nonsense that often trails behind academia like the tail of a doomsday comet, because if not for them, there wouldn’t have been an attempt to preserve the Butler County Hilltop Work and opening it as a park would never have been possible. But science has been slow to acknowledge who these people really were who settled in Ohio as the center of a very advanced culture, who had an obsession with the stars and built all over southwestern Ohio many copies of earthworks that mimicked the constellations in the heavens on earth. These works are every bit as mysterious as the Nazca lines from Peru or even the Pyramids of Giza. Primarily, the reason for the big mystery is that they didn’t just build one of these sites that so accurately reflects an advanced knowledge of astrology. Still, the evidence is pointing increasingly to this same region, and that specific mound location, along with Serpent Mound off to the east, as the basket of an advanced culture that was eradicated likely during the Younger Dryas cataclysm, around 11,600 years ago. And what was left of these people who were interacting globally with all countries before the cataclysm is what we see during this late archaic presence in the Ohio Valley, which ended up a larger part of the Mississippi culture. These were the survivors of that cataclysm, and they marked the ground with a star map of the heavens with these massive depictions of, in this case, a wild boar, which they associated with the Aries constellation. 

Further, on top of the hill is where things get really interesting because the entrance to the effigy, to the north, has a maze that forces the participant to navigate it much the way that the spring equinox had to navigate the Pleiades constellation on its journey from the constellation Taurus into Aries. While on top of the earthwork, which you can see for miles in every direction, it becomes very obvious how difficult it was to shape that natural hill into the shape of a boar to match their celestial observations of the zodiac character of Aries. This was no small effort by any means. It was a massive undertaking, and for what purpose? Well, as I say a lot, remember Plato’s references to Atlantis, where the first god/king of their land was Atlas. And we all know from myth and mystery that Atlas was the creator of Astrology. And here was an obviously advanced culture that had enough leisure time not just to hunt, gather, and reproduce but to build all these magnificent earthworks all over Ohio. They seemed to connect into one grand mythology meant to be seen from the sky. A society obsessed with astrology, obsessed with an equatorial procession along the heavenly zodiacal belt where ages move by overhead every 2,160 years for a total zodiac year of 25,920 years. Society would have to be around for a long time to understand those kinds of time movements of the stars in a reliable way, to understand that their movements were not just coincidental, but over that length of time, were as reliable as a clock. These people did not spend their entire day trying to hunt a deer so they could eat by dinner time.  We have all had an image given to us by Hollywood and the progressive history of what an Indian is, a Native American or even an “indigenous person.” In truth, the reality is far more complicated, and by referencing the many books on Atlantis by Lewis Spence, a respected commentator on such things, or Giambittisto Vico of the great Vico Cycle, or the Bible, we know that very large people that smaller people called giants roamed the earth everywhere. We know Norse mythology had them, the Greeks called them Titans, the Bible referenced to them often living in the land of Canaan, and large people were everywhere dating back to the precise period of the earthworks in Ohio, precisely the one in Butler County formerly known as the Butler County Hilltop Works. Burial mounds all up and down the Great Miami River have reported the bones of people from 7 feet tall up to 10 feet many times, which can be found in Ross Hamilton’s outstanding academic paper called A Tradition of Giants: The Elite Social Hierarchy of American Prehistory which is available for free online. Just look up that title and print it out for yourself. It’s well researched and corresponds to the reports mentioned above about large people buried in the earthworks of Ohio, not just occasionally, but abundantly. I know of a case of a 7-foot person buried in a mound in downtown Hamilton as it was being built. It has been said in many of Spence’s reports on Atlantis that they were a large people and that once the Greeks and Egyptians inherited many of the myths of the lost Atlantis, their concept of the gods was forged in their cultures. Yet, those myths also talk of the Atlanteans coming from the west, and with them, they brought the pagan gods of astrology. There are mounds on the Butler County Hilltop Work site, just off from the top. In them, indeed, just as there is in the Middletown Mound up the river a few miles, then again at Miamisburg, even a few miles more up the same river, there are giant skeletons in them, and science has had a tough time dealing with the knowledge. Because it doesn’t fit our perceptions of who lived in America before America was what it is today. Instead, it looks like those who did live here moved all over the earth and took with them a massive religion of astrology to the far corners of the planet. And they did so long before Europeans were even thinking about building boats. And the natives of America that we call them today were likely global citizens 10,000 years ago, and the proof of their culture is there looming over Butler County like a ghost that is no longer invisible to the casual spectator, thanks to the great scientists and volunteer efforts to open it to the public with a great spectacle finally. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Sons of the Law of One: A solar panel cult to force all civilizations to appease the sun as the supreme god

Well, of course, we have to talk about the ancient sun-worshipping cult, the Sons of the Law of One, and that it predates many of our current religions and political orders. But it gets scary when bad things come up, such as child pedophilia cases in my hometown of Butler County, Ohio, involving hundreds and thousands of well-known people. And if you don’t have a reference for the vast evil on display, you wouldn’t have an explanation for Masons who go into mysterious chants hoping to put a curse on somebody to destroy them or consider that abortion is the political left’s blood cult to appease the gods of ancient pagan religions. When you look to understand modern politics and the reasons people believe what they believe, you usually find out that there is occult worship behind the thin veil in almost every case, including the deep suspicions that the Clintons were involved in the Jeffery Epstein child sex cult, along with Bill Gates and many celebrities. The recent pictures from Halloween of Machine Gun Kelly and Megan Fox only feed this curiosity, as well as Katy Perry and her broken eye. We live in a polite society that doesn’t talk about the real issues that cause the effects which drive our politics, and once you learn what does drive those issues, things make a lot more sense. But for them to make sense, you must reach into society’s occult practices to understand their politics. This is why I have been talking about Atlantis a lot more lately because that is a society that predates our written history and is denied by the established order for all the very reasons talked about, to conceal the occult practices that various groups of people participate in, and drive political policy to mysterious items of worship. In this case, the reason the political left is so obsessed with solar panels. 

We know about Atlantis because Plato, a well-known and accepted Greek philosopher, recorded that society in one of his works. And over time, Atlantis looks to have influenced early English mythology, Ireland, the Vikings, all of Europe, and especially Africa creating Egyptian and Sumerian societies from the outset. Atlantis was ancient when those societies were new. But then there are the Indian mythologies and the mythologies of the white-skinned ones with the Aztecs, Mayas, and Incas. And there are thousands of societies that rose and fell in between these historical events and the mythologies that people ended up remembering of them. So there are multiple variations to those old stories that have created many occult beliefs that have been followed with sacrifices to unknown gods, which can almost always be found working their influence in the political policies of our modern day. So also with the various Indian legends, since we are told by modern progressives that the Indians were so wise and that we should listen to them regarding all things, many of them believe that 250,000 years ago, Star People came to earth from the planet Sirius and settled 12 planets, of which earth was only one, and a minor one at that. The wisdom of these Star People made up what we know today in various cultures, especially Atlantis, which we know the first king was Atlas, who invented all that we know about astrology. And when you know what the high-order Masons believe, much of their action is driven by astrology, just as Egypt and many other cultures that we consider advanced. That is also why most of them revere the planet Sirius as substantial to their functional mythologies. For instance, in the Bible, Sirius is considered the Star of Bethlehem. And when we talk about the 12 Tribes of Israel, the 12 Disciples of Jesus, the 12 months of a year, or the 12 constellations of the zodiac, or the Twelve Tables appointed in 451 BC which led to Roman society from its primitive roots, this is where we get the origin beliefs. 

And from ancient Atlantis and the Indian mythology of the Star People from Sirius, who settled the 12 planets, is the concept of the Sons of the Law of One. It’s a sun-worshipping cult that identifies the sun of our earth’s solar system as the life giver and the ultimate god to appease. The Law of One then migrated into many of the cultures we currently recognize, and they all had a reverence for sun worship. Many of the human sacrifices that the Aztecs made were to appease the sun. Many of the myths that formed around the world, as a result, were sun god worship that in the absence of a Christian religion, all of society migrates back to this notion of the Law of One, the one sun, the life giver of everything, and for which we are all dependent. When you see that the political left is upset with space travel, it’s because mankind proposes to leave behind the control of the sun and essentially divorce ourselves from these ancient beliefs with self-fulfilling innovation and technology. But then again, many are using technology as a means to chain mankind to continued worship of the Law of One. We have seen that in the tech companies specifically and their infatuation with pagan gods from the distant past. And we certainly see it in the bizarre push for solar panels.

The only way to understand the insanity of the liberal push to chain mankind to the limited energy available from the sun with solar panels is to understand the ancient ideas of the Sons of the Law of One and the astrology invented by the Atlantean god Atlas and the knowledge he revealed from the Star People from Sirius. The push for all-electric cars and a society that destroys fossil fuels and forces everyone to essentially worship the sun as the primary means of living life is obviously a sacrifice of innovation to force compliance to the sun and its role at the center of our solar system. But when people are looking for logic as to why our political society would do such a dumb thing, they will not find the answer in the logic of scholarly debate or the rule of law in congress. They have to go back to the Sons of the Law of One, to the culture of Atlantis, to the horoscope cultures of the world, including the one you might have looked at today in the Farmer’s Almanac. Once you understand the occult logic behind the political maneuver, you can understand how stupid it really is. We are in an age of science and reason, not a society that must bend itself to the limits of ancient superstitions. We have rational minds who can invent our own means of power. But to those who worship other gods besides the Christian concept of commanding nature and instead yielding to it as all ancient cultures had to, especially Atlantis, then it should never be a surprise to see those cultures fail, just as we will fail if we follow the same dumb laws and appease the spirits of ancient hokey religions. But lazy people, they want an easy way to live life, and appeasing some ancient god or trying to appease the sun is a lot easier than inventing a thorium reactor or bolding blasting into space to create our own origin stories; not one started 250,000 years ago, or millions of years ago. But now, with America driving innovation and creativity to an unknown but exciting tomorrow. The clash essentially comes down to the brave and innovative instead of the lazy and superstitious. And the battle for tomorrow will depend on who wins that many generational wars.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Happy We Are Going Back to Mars with Starship: The evidence points to lots of human interaction between the Red Planet and Earth many years in the past

Well, I mean exactly that when I say I’m looking forward to returning to Mars. I do indeed mean, return. I’m very excited for the next SpaceX mission into space with its Starship orbiter. Going to Mars is important, even if the Biden administration isn’t at all excited about it. In fact, the entire Liberal World Order isn’t excited about it, and for a good reason. Options take power away from them, and they want limited options for the human race to give themselves more power. It’s the classic problem of those in communist countries trying to flee those places for freer destinations. That is the same reason the Biden administration and Liberal World Order are generally not excited about commercial space travel. They want a centralized government controlling everything, and humanity moving into a space-oriented civilization only complicates that for them. So, of course, the FFA is slow to give SpaceX permits, and that will have to change for Elon Musk to do what he wants, which is to send hundreds of Starships to Mars and the Moon soon so that mankind can finally take that giant leap that started with the moon, but stopped when NASA became overrun with mindless bureaucrats, congressional funding based purely on politics, and a world order that wanted to make Earth the center of the universe so they could maintain power, and to keep it that way. But SpaceX has their permit for the orbital launch, which will happen in late October or early November, which is very exciting. Mars awaits. 

I live in mound country, and there  is a mound near my home that I have talked about a lot, the Middletown Mound, which is essentially a twin to the one up the Great Miami River called Miamisburg Mound. I’ve been to the Stonehenge site with Avebury to the north and saw firsthand that their Silbury Mound is almost identical in height to the Miamisburg Mound and the Middletown Mound before it was looted in the late 1800s, and further excavation was mysteriously abandoned. Knowing the mounds well from my home in the Ohio Valley and seeing several along the Mississippi Valley over the years, when I saw the ground structures of Stonehenge and Avebury, I immediately recognized them as the same culture, meaning they had been communicating across the Atlantic Ocean well before Christ was born which meant that shipping that could make the voyage was possible. And since then, I have been looking for answers to the many questions that arise when those possibilities are considered. Then the problem gets even more complex when it has been photographed that on Mars, in what many call the remains of a city near the now famous face, there are complex mound structures too, much like Miamisburg, Middletown, and Silbury. So rather than speculate based on what we see in pictures photographed from a long way away, I am looking forward to capitalist-driven archaeology to investigate as part of the Elon Musk population of Mars plan that will finally have an opportunity to check these things out with eyes on the ground and figure out what really happened, and where the human race actually started.

This is all speculation but based on hypothetical knowledge based on the evidence that we have so far been able to gather, Mars, around 17,000 years ago, looks to have been hit by a very large planetary object from the southern hemisphere pushing up toward the north. The impact was so significant that the crust of Mars in the northern part of the planet was punched away, nearly destroying the planet entirely. The debris field between Jupiter and Mars is likely evidence of the intended killer. And still, on Earth, a lot of debris continues to fall each year as it is still floating around in space, only to be eventually caught in our gravitational pull. It might take several more thousand years for it all to fall on Earth and surrounding planets. Science fiction movies don’t do a very good job of capturing the timeline of geology in space.

Along with this cataclysm, the atmosphere was ripped away, and the oceans of Mars evaporated into space, never to return and what we see now is a husk of a planet once thriving with life, just as life on Earth is now. Understanding what happened and how it may very well be that life left that planet for a safer place, perhaps millions of years ago, or even during the last Ice Age, to become the Atlantis culture that is much talked about is undoubtedly worth an investigation. Pretty cool stuff if you aren’t in love with the silly modern interpretation of things, the same scientists who told us not to take Hydroxychloroquine during the manmade Covid outbreak of 2020. You must always be careful of science that gets paid by funders who demand a narrative and not what science actually produces with hard evidence. Speaking of evidence right in front of our faces, I was just in Michigan looking at the impact crater that made Saginaw Bay to confirm the evidence about the Younger Dryas cataclysm that took place 11,600 years ago, roughly. It looks like that large comet very likely could have been pieces of the hard impact that nearly destroyed Mars just a few thousand years earlier. The puzzle pieces begin to go together pretty fast when you look at all the pieces, not just what governments give us to look at based on their desire to control our assumptions, for many reasons.  The mound cultures in the Ohio River Valley have always been associated with Indians. Still, it’s evident that these were not a culture of primitive hunters and gatherers. Still, within their body of knowledge, they had concepts of advanced geometry and calculus and a very detailed mythology involving stellar bodies. They had a relationship with the stars that exceeds what hunters and gathers would otherwise have reason to nurture, other than looking up and seeing that they were there. This is particularly obvious at Serpent Mound in eastern Ohio and the Newark Mound complex just outside of Columbus, Ohio. The Newark Holy Stones found there in 1860 are rationalized now by lazy scientists as a hoax, but I don’t think so. And I don’t think so based on the Cincinnati and Wilmington Tablets also found in mounds around Ohio that do not connect directly to what we know of Indian cultures.

They depict an early version of the Ten Commandments in a place where nobody in an Indian tribe would know anything about a Biblical context. The controversy reminds me of a discussion I had with an employee at the British Museum over the Crystal Skull they have there. He stated to me that the skull had to be a hoax because nobody in Europe had come up with the ability to cut quartz so smoothly until much later than the dating proposed for that Crystal Skull found in Mexico. So everyone just wrote it off as a hoax because it didn’t fit the narrative. But what if the narrative didn’t have all the words, I proposed back to him. What if some cultures had developed such methods while other cultures were thousands of years behind in evolution, and we just haven’t discovered the connection yet? To assume that Europe evolved at a certain pace and everyone else in the world followed that trajectory is not very smart. But that was the suggestion. And as we know from the Vico Cycle, that may be the case for the human race over many millions of years, not just the most recent thousands. There is still a lot of evidence to collect to put the story together, but what we do have does not point to the history we know but one we are yet to discover. And when we get to Mars, it looks like many more pieces will be discovered, and we’ll learn a whole lot more about ourselves.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Temptations of Tubber Tintye: Why we must protect ourselves from the lowlifes of government

As I watched the looters, thieves, and outright crooks of the Washington D.C. culture at the State of the Union address of March 1st, 2022, I thought about how wonderful it was that America formed a constitution that limited government not one that fed it. It is no accident that America, out of all the world’s countries, has been the most successful at everything it’s done. That is because it has limited government, not exacerbated it, how centralized governments in the East and in Europe have done. However, the government is management, and we need people to do these tasks. We need government just as we do in all management. But we always need to check its power, not yield to it. And after all that we’ve been through, watching that speech where just about everything Joe Biden said was a complete reversal of everything he’s done, just as Wisconsin announced significant flaws in their election count, which just pours more gas on the fire of the Biden administration even being legitimate, the dangers of low-quality people in government was obvious. The Federal Reserve has fed BlackRock and Larry Fink as a progressive activist for climate change directly connected to the World Economic Forum Davos guys, leading to massive corruption with quantitative easing. With thousands of terrible stories of deceit and scandal, America is a great place regardless of those awful stories. The bad stories don’t define us because we have a great Constitution that separates the lowlifes from the rest of us.

I’ve been on a reading binge, which has only confirmed my thoughts. Last year I spent a lot of time traveling and writing my own book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. It is pretty much the opposite of what all centralized governments want, including corporate structures, how to defend individual will from the desires of a lecherous mob of looters, which most groups and organizations become by default. And learning what I have recently about finance, woke politics, and the movers and players around the world vying for power and control on a grand chessboard has only confirmed my thoughts articulated in that Gunfighter’s Guide. Of course, my opinions create scandal because people generally don’t see themselves as lowlifes who must be defended from. They want to believe that with extensive, fancy educations and lots of money in their bank accounts, they would be respected as some aristocracy of money, which is the fundamental problem of Washington D.C. culture. However, my measure for these kinds of things goes back to the realm of myth, where much of my early reading days were spent thinking about such things. Early in my life, as I was working out the value of the human race over many omelets in Waffle Houses at 4 am in the morning, during my own college days, I studied mythology and comparative religion, and I fell in love with a particular Irish story that captured these values exceptionally well. It’s called King of Erin and the Queen of the Lonesome Island and features a young prince who goes on a treasure hunt to the castle of the Queen of Tubber Tintye to save his mother. This story is how I measure human beings’ worth, why I have no illusions about the kind of people who end up trying to run our lives, and explains why we must always be skeptical of them. 

The young Prince arrives at the castle and steps through a window to combat many monsters and maniacal creatures guarding it. But once he slays them, he comes to a corridor with 12 rooms down it. He sees sleeping there the most beautiful woman he has ever seen in the first room. He is tempted to go in and enjoy her company. But he is a person of great personal worth, so he stays focused on his treasure hunt and resumes his journey down the corridor. In the next room is a woman even more beautiful than the first. And so, it goes down the entire hall until he gets to the last room beyond the 12th. In the 13th room is a giant golden room with the most beautiful woman in existence laying upon a spinning golden couch. Of course, that is the Queen of Tubber Tintye, and the two live happily ever after, relative to the tragic nature of Irish mythology. But the point of the story is obvious. Most people of great wealth in the world usually go into those first two rooms in their lives and never go any further. They’ll grab the beauties and parade them around at parties and fundraisers, so everyone thinks of them as being great people. But they never come close to the treasures that are at the end of the hall. Obviously, there is more to just physical beauty, such as wisdom and experience. But many people I would call lowlifes never come close to those understandings. Instead, they fall for the first beauty they meet in the first room and use that treasure to brag on for the rest of their lives, never developing entirely as people. 

We must have a constitution like our one in America because of this story. Most people who take these jobs can never be trusted. We need them to do the work, but we can’t afford to give them the keys to our kingdom because they are the type of people who fall for the shiny stuff in life and don’t have the guts or patience to explore the whole castle of Tubber Tintye and resist the temptations along the way. Much of the kind of government these people are drawn to feeds their temptations; it doesn’t require them to fight it. And so, we have a world of massive corruption, and we shouldn’t expect anything less from them. But we do need the means to protect ourselves from their natures. Despite having these lowlife scumbags running our government, America has been prosperous because we have protected ourselves from their natures which fall for every temptation that comes at them. When I say that, I think of people like Larry Fink. They have bridged a gap between the Federal Reserve printing endless amounts of money to feed Wall Street, then using the power gained from that exchange to propel the goals of the Davos crowds’ radical progressivism, backdooring our political system in a public/private partnership that has turned out to be detrimental and terribly destructive. To me, Fink is just another sucker who fell for the beauty in the first room. He didn’t even make it to the second room. Let alone the golden chamber beyond the 12 rooms. And primarily, that is the same story we could apply to just about every person in attendance at the State of the Union speech where Biden was illegally inserted to protect that Beltway culture from the judgment of the outside world. And to me, most everyone falls short of my judgment. I’m not saying we get rid of the government. But we wouldn’t have a good country if we allowed the lowlifes who do make their way into government to ruin our lives with their bad decisions. And by bad choices, it’s the kind of people who fall for the temptations in the first rooms of the grand hallways of the Tubber Tintye castle. Within the scheme of things is most everyone. We aren’t proposing to throw those people away as useless. But we do have to protect ourselves from their gullibility to temptations that make them dangerous to the human race. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Corporation of Disney Versus Sole Proprietorship of George Lucas: Why the new Star Wars is so terrible

With all the accolades given to the new Star Wars film The Force Awakens I take a bit of pride in being one of the very few to point out the obvious problems with it, and the gross neglect it represents on not only American culture, but international civilization.  Star Wars has a responsibility provided to it by its half century long quest to play that part with the human race, so when it takes that role for granted, it is the job of people like me to point it out.  Anybody can do such a thing after others have already jumped on the bandwagon.  Presently, The Force Awakens is the fastest movie to hit $1 billion in global sales and it’s still moving along at a respectable rate.  By every box-office measure, The Force Awakens is a glorious success.  Yet I’m saying that it’s not successful, which to some may appear baffling.  Here’s why, Star Wars surrendered what it was to become something that it isn’t and that deduction can be reduced to a very simple social understanding of how things work outside of a mother’s womb.  To get the gist of what’s wrong with The Force Awakens watch the very interesting reviews shown below. Watch them all, they tell the whole story.  I’ll go a step further in my explanation, but it’s a good place to begin.

One of the most difficult things a job creator can do is make decisions to eliminate the jobs of the people who count on you.  It is excessively hard—I think it’s one of the hardest things a human mind does in a capitalist society—because a means to a living is the sustenance used to survive from day-to-day.  George Lucas wanted to retire at 70 years old but he had all these employees that he felt responsible for, so he went looking for a way to keep them all busy so that he could retire in good conscience feeling he did what was right by them.  He sold his company to Disney hoping that it was the closest company to his own methods that would respect his former property and do well for an entirely new generation.   I was a supporter of it, until I saw the results. It would have done more people more good to just leave Star Wars alone and laid-off all the Lucasfilm employees.  Laying off 2000 Lucasfilm employees would have been painful, but the results have been worse.  Because in destroying Star Wars, it has taken away the good meaning it has possessed to literally hundreds of millions of people who now consider it something of a religion.

When the sale of Lucasfilm to Disney took place, many proclaimed that it was a sale to the dark side, but they said so without really understanding why.  Corporations have a tendency to be viewed as evil, while individuals are given great latitude for forgiveness.  This is the heart of the problem.  As a fan of unlimited capitalism, I should be very supportive of corporations—which I am in that they provide jobs and great products to a free marketplace.  But, they are often very socialist in their nature and their employees bring that mentality with them to the voting booth. For instance, a worker at P&G or GE works in an environment that does not promote personal growth and individuality—they work in very team oriented environments where the greater good of the company is often the focus.  This is a standard in most corporations—so when Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton expresses the values of socialism most voters are already receptive to it because they live that life within the corporate world.  Corporations are collective based organizations that are often top-heavy and loaded with too much management at the back of the train defined by the Metaphysics of Quality.  Not enough people at the front providing leadership, and too many in the back which slows down the train from true productivity.  To hide this problem, corporations hire lobbyists to work K-Street in Washington on their behalf to prevent competition, so that the corporation can stay alive longer at the expense of more capitalist invention.

I’m not a fan of corporations, but I am a fan of the people who lead them, individuals like George Lucas, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and the original Walt Disney—among many others.  To me, once those strong leaders leave their corporations, everyone who follows are second handers.  This is why I am a fan of people like Carl Icahn who is the original corporate raider—who defined the term, “hostile takeover” by purchasing the stock of failing corporations and inserting new management with real leadership to make a sizable profit.  The introduction of competition to the corporate world makes everyone better and more honest and is needed in a capitalist society.  Without that behavior, you only get degrees of socialism which is terrible because it forces people to behave as collective entities proving detrimental to individual integrity.

Star Wars was always about the power of the individual, Luke Skywalker being the only hope for the Force to overthrow the emperor, Han Solo to always be functioning just outside the organized systems of the rebellion long enough to save everyone, and Obi-Wan residing in a desert all alone as the last of his kind to preserve goodness for a new generation.  Even the robot Artoo Detoo functions as a rogue individualist often breaking protocol to do what he thinks is right as C3PO representing the corporate world of doing as programmed berates him for comic relief.  In The Empire Strikes Back when Luke senses that Han and Leia are being tortured on Cloud City Yoda tells the young Jedi that he must stay and not be lured into a trap if he honors what they fight for.  The designation is clear, the relief of collective pain is not more important than the value of an individual who alone has the power to save the galaxy.  That is powerful stuff and why I along with millions of others have been a fan of Star Wars for over three decades.

The Force Awakens is a corporate movie made by the second handers of George Lucas and Walt Disney.  They are corporate minds who think in terms of sacrifice and the greater good before individual integrity, just as any corporation resents the individualist–those who do what they want in the corner cubical, and does not socialize during lunch with others and doesn’t follow orders from their superiors.  Rey the strong female who is obviously Jaina Solo from the Expanded Universe miraculously knows how to do everything which is a problem that many people have with the film upon viewing.  Many are willing to suspend their disbelief because the female hero is such a strong and compelling character that viewers are willing to overlook the problem initially.  The dilemma is that the characters in The Force Awakens are just along for the ride.  The Force is the hero of this movie and all the characters are subservient to it.  Rey is the victim of the sword that finds her, not because she finds it—her role is a passive participation in the adventure which is a direct violation of the “Hero’s Journey” that all Star Wars movies embody to some degree.  The Force uses her to get through impossible situations like flying the Falcon and fighting Kylo Ren at the end of the film.  She doesn’t survive them because she is an active participant.   She’s just “going with the flow,” and yielding to a mysterious Force that is guiding her actions.  Those are aspects of Star Wars that have always been weak, easily overshadowed by the efforts of Han Solo.

In the original films The Force was something to be listened to, but according to Obi-Wan, it also obeyed your commands—as an individual.  In The Force Awakens The Force is doing all the heavy lifting which is a corporate view of what Obi-Wan said in the film A New Hope, “there is no such thing as luck.”  This indicates that all the heroics of Han Solo in the past movies were not because of his skill as an individual pilot, or a decision that was made at a key time, but was due to The Force working through him.  This cheapens Star Wars considerably into a religion instead of a myth building tool to encourage people to follow their personal bliss.  It is the difference between a company run by a strong individual, and a corporation ran by a board of directors and a CEO as their representative.  One is an individual enterprise; the other is a collective based entity.

In time, once the fun of a new Star Wars movie fades, the impact that the films had will fade considerably as they will lose their meaning due to this corporate interpretation of The Force as opposed to the one that George Lucas nurtured.  The corporation puts up memos on a bulletin board and expects everyone to be appeased and to serve the needs of the collective entity—no matter who it is.  A company ran by a strong individual personally speaks to everyone and gives them guidance in developing their own individuality for the good of the company. It is a slight distinction that makes all the difference in the world regarding the end result.  Clearly George Lucas understands that distinction, and Disney as an organization collectively based, does not.  That is why The Force Awakens is a failure even though on paper immediately it appears successful.  Its mythology has been tampered with and is now changed forever—for the worse.  The message is one now of collectivism as opposed to individuality and that makes it very dangerous—and vile.

Now you should understand dear reader why you felt that The Force Awakens was a bad movie, but didn’t quite know how or why. It looked like Star Wars, sounded like Star Wars, had the same characters as the original Star Wars—but it wasn’t Star Wars.  It turned the overall message away from the rebellion of freedom fighters fighting for an individualized galactic republic and put the emphasis on collectivism and the reach and authority of corporations and the eventual tenacity to grind away everything that stands in their way.  And there isn’t much anybody can do about it but wait for some unseen Force to tell us what to do.  To those broken by corporate socialism into waiting for permission to use the rest room or get their vacations approved by a superior, they love Rey in the film because it’s all they can hope for in their lives after being beaten by collectivism for many years into no other option but to hope that they’ll win the lottery or gain an inheritance to earn their freedom from the grind.  But for hard-core Star Wars fans, Han Solo was the self-determined individual who functioned heroically not due to special powers or hooky religions—but by his own actions.  And in The Force Awakens, they killed off that character—for the “greater good.”  The message couldn’t have been clearer from the corporation known as Disney.

Rich “Cliffhanger” Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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Hercules was a Murderer and Homosexual: The fault of mythic heroes rooted in sacrifice

I have not yet seen the new film about Hercules by Dwayne Johnson but its release does bring up an interesting issue which needs to be addressed. Hercules was a failed hero—in spite of the world believing that he was the highest human beings had to offer. Hercules was a murderer and in the end sacrificed himself much the way Christ would many years later paving the way for a culture the world over obsessed with the notion of sacrifice as opposed to creation. The basic premise of Hercules if looked at beyond his extraordinary Paul Bunyan type of mythic folklore feats was that he was a troubled man easily manipulated by hidden spirits—in this case his jealous step mother Hera. Hercules killed and destroyed others and no matter how strong he was—his only way to divine settlement was through sacrifice. The constant resurrection of the Hercules myth as a superhero of human civilization is faulty and built on a terrible weakness imposed on history—the notion that sacrifice is the highest strength that even Hercules would eventually discover and that the moral to his story is that all who follow him may someday reach the same destination. The Hercules story is simply a prequel to Christ—both have a similar ending and the adventures leading up to that ultimate decision were extraordinary and laced with miracles. But it is the motive of Hercules to begin with which should bring great trepidation to all listeners of the old Greek tale of a half man-half god—created by a love affair through his father Zeus, the early prototype for Yahweh.

After killing his music tutor Linus with a lyre, Hercules was sent to tend cattle on a mountain by his foster father Amphitryon. Here, according to an allegorical parable, “The Choice of Heracles”, invented by the sophist Prodicus (c. 400 BCE) and reported in Xenophon‘s Memorabilia 2.1.21–34, he was visited by two nymphs—Pleasure and Virtue—who offered him a choice between a pleasant and easy life or a severe but glorious life: he chose the latter. This was part of a pattern of “ethicizing” Heracles over the 5th century BCE.[15]

Later in Thebes, Hercules married King Creon‘s daughter, Megara. In a fit of madness, induced by Hera—Zeus’ jealous wife, Heracles killed his children by Megara. After his madness had been cured with hellebore by Antikyreus, the founder of Antikyra,[16] he realized what he had done and fled to the Oracle of Delphi. The story at this point differs somewhat depending on various translations, in some stories Hercules also killed Megara bathing in the blood of his family. In others Heracles gave his wife, Megara, at the age of thirty three, to his nephew Iolaus, then only sixteen years old[4] – ostensibly because the sight of her reminded him of his murder of their three children. In either version, Hercules was a haunted man prone to murder and far from being a pillar of strength. Even with all his great strength, he failed to secure his family from the forces of the gods—which clearly promotes the ideal that no man can stand against the unseen forces of Mt Olympus.

Unbeknownst to him, the Oracle was guided by Hera. He was directed to serve King Eurystheus for ten years and perform any task Eurystheus required of him. Eurystheus decided to give Heracles ten labours, but after completing them, Heracles was cheated by Eurystheus when he added two more, resulting in the Twelve Labors of Heracles.

Hercules was the Roman name for the Greek divine hero Heracles. The Romans adapted the Greek hero’s iconography and myths for their literature and art under the name Hercules. In later Western art and literature and in popular culture, Hercules is more commonly used than Heracles as the name of the hero. Hercules was a multifaceted figure with contradictory characteristics, which enabled later artists and writers to pick and choose how to represent him.[1] This article provides an introduction to representations of Hercules in the later tradition.

Hercules is known for his many adventures, which took him to the far reaches of the Greco-Roman world. One cycle of these adventures became canonical as the “Twelve Labours,” but the list has variations. Driven mad by Hera, Heracles slew his own family. To expiate the crime, Heracles was required to carry out ten labors set by his archenemy, Eurystheus, who had become king in Heracles’ place. If he succeeded, he would be purified of his sin and, as myth says, he would be granted immortality. Heracles accomplished these tasks, but Eurystheus did not accept the cleansing of the Augean stables because Heracles was going to accept pay for the labor. Neither did he accept the killing of the Lernaean Hydra as Heracles’ nephew, Iolaus, had helped him burn the stumps of the heads. Eurysteus set two more tasks (fetching the Golden Apples of Hesperides and capturing Cerberus), which Heracles performed successfully, bringing the total number of tasks up to twelve.

One traditional order of the labours is found in the Bibliotheca as follows:[2]

  1. Slay the Nemean Lion.
  2. Slay the nine-headed Lernaean Hydra.
  3. Capture the Golden Hind of Artemis.
  4. Capture the Erymanthian Boar.
  5. Clean the Augean stables in a single day.
  6. Slay the Stymphalian Birds.
  7. Capture the Cretan Bull.
  8. Steal the Mares of Diomedes.
  9. Obtain the girdle of Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons.
  10. Obtain the cattle of the monster Geryon.
  11. Steal the apples of the Hesperides.
  12. Capture and bring back Cerberus.

This is described in Ovid‘s Metamorphoses Book IX. Having wrestled and defeated Achelous, god of the Acheloos river, Heracles takes Deianira as his wife. Travelling to Tiryns, a centaur, Nessus, offers to help Deianira across a fast flowing river while Heracles swims it. However, Nessus is true to the archetype of the mischievous centaur and tries to steal Deianira away while Heracles is still in the water. Angry, Heracles shoots him with his arrows dipped in the poisonous blood of the Lernaean Hydra. Thinking of revenge, Nessus gives Deianira his blood-soaked tunic before he dies, telling her it will “excite the love of her husband”.[54]

Several years later, rumor tells Deianira that she has a rival for the love of Heracles. Deianira, remembering Nessus’ words, gives Heracles the bloodstained shirt. Lichas, the herald, delivers the shirt to Heracles. However, it is still covered in the Hydra’s blood from Heracles’ arrows, and this poisons him, tearing his skin and exposing his bones. Before he dies, Heracles throws Lichas into the sea, thinking he was the one who poisoned him (according to several versions, Lichas turns to stone, becoming a rock standing in the sea, named for him). Heracles then uproots several trees and builds a funeral pyre, which Poeas, father of Philoctetes, lights. As his body burns, only his immortal side is left. Through Zeus’ apotheosis, Heracles rises to Olympus as he dies.

In addition to the life of Hercules he was not only a womanizing adulterer but a homosexual. Heracles had a number of male lovers. Plutarch, in his Eroticos, maintains that Heracles’ male lovers were beyond counting. Of these, the one most closely linked to Heracles is the Theban Iolaus. According to a myth thought to be of ancient origins, Iolaus was Heracles’ charioteer and squire. Heracles in the end helped Iolaus find a wife. Plutarch reports that down to his own time, male couples would go to Iolaus’s tomb in Thebes to swear an oath of loyalty to the hero and to each other.[20][21]

One of Heracles’ male lovers, and one represented in ancient as well as modern art, is Hylas. Though it is of more recent vintage (dated to the 3rd century) than that with Iolaus, it had themes of mentoring in the ways of a warrior and help finding a wife in the end. However it should be noted that there is nothing whatever in Apollonius’s account that suggests that Hylas was a sexual lover as opposed to a companion and servant.[22]

Another reputed male lover of Heracles is Elacatas, who was honored in Sparta with a sanctuary and yearly games, Elacatea. The myth of their love is an ancient one.[23]

Abdera‘s eponymous hero, Abderus, was another of Heracles’ lovers. He was said to have been entrusted with—and slain by—the carnivorous mares of Thracian Diomedes. Heracles founded the city of Abdera in Thrace in his memory, where he was honored with athletic games.[24]

Another myth is that of Iphitus.[25]

Another story is the one of his love for Nireus, who was “the most beautiful man who came beneath Ilion” (Iliad, 673). But Ptolemy adds that certain authors made Nireus out to be a son of Heracles.[26]

Pausanias makes mention of Sostratus, a youth of Dyme, Achaea, as a lover of Heracles. Sostratus was said to have died young and to have been buried by Heracles outside the city. The tomb was still there in historical times, and the inhabitants of Dyme honored Sostratus as a hero.[27] The youth seems to have also been referred to as Polystratus.

There is also a series of lovers who are either later inventions or purely literary conceits. Among these are Admetus, who assisted in the hunt for the Calydonian Boar;[28] Adonis;[29] Corythus;[29] and Nestor, who was said to have been loved for his wisdom. His role as lover was perhaps to explain why he was the only son of Neleus to be spared by the hero.[30]

A scholiast on Argonautica lists the following male lovers of Heracles: “Hylas, Philoctetes, Diomus, Perithoas, and Phrix, after whom a city in Libya was named”.[31] Diomus is also mentioned by Stephanus of Byzantium as the eponym of the deme Diomeia of the Attic phyle Aegeis: Heracles is said to have fallen in love with Diomus when he was received as guest by Diomus’ father Collytus.[32] Perithoas and Phrix are otherwise unknown, and so is the version that suggests a sexual relationship between Heracles and Philoctetes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heracles

Clearly the continued attempt to perpetuate the Hercules myth by contemporary society—frustrated by the pacifism of Christianity is to point them into the direction of the very flawed personality of Hercules. It should be no wonder then that men to this very day are confused as to how to act—as the heroes that history has pointed them to are men such as Hercules—men of strength who could create the rocks of Gibraltar, bed thousands of women and men, and still be considered a hero even though they killed their entire family.

The power of myth is far stronger than the rule of law—it is what people believe deep inside and what types of religions that they will seek to support that belief system which shapes society. Myth is what creates that belief system—it is the epistemology of philosophy. When Hercules is held as the highest form of man, then these are the parameters that mankind sets for themselves. If the Hercules story did not evolve into the Christ story which has then become the largest religion on planet earth and shaped the minds of most every human being that has ever breathed—then the faults of the story could be dismissed. But even after thousands of years, there is still a desire to resurrect such a flawed character as Hercules as the finest example of what a human being can be—which is pretty pathetic.

Hercules was nothing more than a sexually obsessed murderer easily manipulated by the forces of Mt Olympus—the spirit world—who ultimately killed himself to be free of its grip. And to this very day, human beings still believe wrongly that sacrifice is the way to heaven instead of higher virtues associated with production, enterprise, and genuine goodness.

When a guy in a bar on a business trip far from home is encountered by a woman also on a business trip far from home with a few drinks in her decide they want to play with each other sexually, the man might go through his list of heroes in his mind who helped shape his thoughts and think of Hercules. Even Disney has made a hero of the old Greek protagonist—so the modern references are there as most superheroes can point back to the old Greek myths for their origins. The man about to bed the woman might think of his wife back home and justify that Hercules did it, and so can he. After all, isn’t death awaiting all of us at some point—so all we must do is do some little appeasement to the gods and all will be forgiven—so why not bed the drunk woman in the bar?” And so the saga goes, and thus one more case of adultery, and the path to yet another destroyed family ensues where little kids lose hope that the men of their life can provide role models and that the state is all anyone can depend on. And those who run the state reside on Mt Olympus and live like gods and must be appeased with sacrifice. So long as those things happen, life is a free for all ending in death and resurrection—no matter how great the sins are. After all, Hercules killed his family and to atone for it he did many heroic deeds which serviced ultimately all of society and in the end sacrificed himself so that he could become a member of Olympus with the other gods and live happily ever after.

Our society needs new heroes to fill the void of mythic storytelling. Hercules was a loser, and not the type of character that should set the standard of behavior for our entire society. But as of now—he is—and Hollywood yet again is resurrecting him as a way to keep the old beliefs intact for a new generation. And what that generation will find if they follow Hercules is a pyre of wood at the end of their life and nothing else. Sacrificial redemption is the only value of such a society and the ultimate failure of the ancient past that is relevant to our modern times through art and myth. Hercules was a fallen hero who should be rejected, not honored, and points to the deep need that the human race has for better characters far more powerful than Hercules–and far more dependable.

Rich Hoffman

www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com