User:Jeremygbyrne/Astrology (film)

Astrology is a movie based on its namesake, the third book in Sylvia Roslyn La Some's Alchemy Cycle. Set in British Honduras, Mexico and Guatemala in the late 1930s the movie involves a mix of fictional and historical characters in a magic realist, parahistorical framework. It is in some senses a prequel to Alchemy.

Cast

Douglas Monroe — Danny Glover
Margarite Hessen —
Jose-Maria Menchú — Anthony LaPaglia
Frida Kahlo —
Pedro Ximenez —
Fritz Lang —
Diego Rivera —

Characters

Jose-Maria Menchú

"Brother Sun" was born in British Honduras (now Belize) in 1902, a "Mestizo" with a native Yucatec Mayan mother and a Spanish-Mexican father. "Rescued" from the streets of Corozal by a visiting priest who witnessed the murder of his mother, he was raised in a Franciscan monastery in Mérida and became a friar in 1920.

Jose-Maria's mother was a Cruzob, a proud citizen/believer of the short-lived independent Mayan nation of Chan Santa Cruz, which revolted against the formal caste system in 1847 and maintained its independence until it was conquered by Mexico in 1901. (The revolution — against the sovereign nation of Yucatán, at that stage not a part of Mexico — had originated as a defence of communally held lands against the expansion of private ownership. The syncretic Cult of the Talking Cross became the Cruzob state religion, inspiring the ongoing resistance against the resurgent Yucatecans/Mexicans. The war was settled in 1915 when the socialist Mexican government allowed the independent Maya the land reforms they'd long been asking for.) His father was a revolutionary intellectual from Mexico City, hoping to find amongst the Maya a rural socialist utopian opposition to the Díaz dictatorship, who was killed in the final defence of Chan Santa Cruz.

Menchú became involved with Margarite Hessen and Douglas Monroe's 1937/38 expedition to the newly-discovered "City of the Snake", Calakmul in the heart of the Campeche Petén, on the trail of film-maker Fritz Lang and the mysterious and almost certainly diabolical Doctor M. He proved heroically invaluable to the group, and became a lifelong inspiration to the youngest expedition member, nine year-old Pedro Ximenez, the boy who would become Giovanni Cardinal Masci, Bishop of Sabina-Poggio Mireto.

Plot

{{spoiler}} Note the first edition of occult encyclopaedia, the fabulously illustrated The Secret Teachings of All Ages by Manly Hall (text, reprint on Amazon), published in 1928, features in the film. (It included a detailed section on Alchemy and criticised modern materialism ("linking Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism to Pythagoreanism, Alchemy, etc etc to the shadowy Illuminati pulling the strings behind the formation of the United States and its model of government. America supposedly has some sort of Mystical Destiny that was predetermined by a group of Immortal Magi, the true initiates of the Elysian and Hermetic mysteries, and so on.") The book inspires both Monroe and Hessen, on different sides of the planet, to seek out the Serpent Wisdom in the Amazon.

Note connection to later novels by intrigues surrounding "discovery" of oil in Arabia in 1938 (Munroe has personal knowledge about a discovery there in the 1910s). (The Saudi regime of Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud has been established by St John Philby and his predecessors in the British Secret Service (in coordination with Allen Dulles's CIA — formed from the ORG following the success of the "Saints" in promoting their eschatonic form of Zionism by engineering the Holocaust — who engineer the wahabbist ideology into the House of Saud in 1914 and eventually Abdul Aziz into power over the whole of Saudi Arabia.) Also [1] discussing aliens in Islam, possibly explaining Dabbat al-ard.

Saints and Serpents

The 4,500 year-old conspiracy group nicknamed "the Saints" are, in the mythos of the Cycle, in perpetual opposition to "the Serpents" (although it eventually transpires that both groups were founded as schismatic branches of the same dinosaur religious system). The Serpents, recalling an ancient tradition, seek to prevent the fated End of the World, which they believe will constitute a mass harvesting of the souls of humanity by a malevolent force, recapitulating the fate of their erstwhile fellows.

Timeline

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1938

Events in the movie also touch on events during the century 1863 through 1963, and on events in the Middle East in the early years of the twentieth century.

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Trivia

The story of Astrology forms the basis of the Call of Cthulhu adventure The Quicksilver Screens