Apocalypse Barbie: Occult Themes In 'Barbenheimer' Movie
This week the Oscar race was run. Barbenheimer, the moniker given to the double feature sensation of last summer featuring Barbie and Oppenheimer, came home with armfuls of the coveted Academy Awards.
Like most people, I paid to see one film, in this case Oppenheimer. Like some people, after it finished I jumped into the theater next door to see the other one. Without paying of course.
In my opinion the high point of Barbenheimer was seeing Ryan Gosling as Ken sing “I’m Just Ken.”
The most irrelevant scene was Cillian Murphy as Robert Oppenheimer sitting in a room butt naked.
But I’m not a movie critic and you can go ahead and debate me on that.
I am however a keen observer on the implosion of our Apocalypse Culture and the seemingly endless parade of symbolism celebrating it. So let’s talk about the films from that perspective.
Barbie is a fantasy comedy based on the eponymous fashion doll by Mattel. Oppenheimer is the biographical drama about Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist known as the “father of the atomic bomb” for his role in the Manhattan Project.
The simultaneous release of both movies on July 21, 2023 led to the cultural phenomenon known as “Barbenheimer” which encouraged viewers to see the films as a double feature.
Barbie has grossed over $1.4 billion, the highest grossing film of the year and Oppenheimer comes in at third with under a billion. Truly the cinematic event of the year. But what does this have to do with the occult?
As we shall find, the double feature of ‘Barbenheimer’ may very well serve a deeper occult purpose, that of manifesting the Whore of Babylon Herself.
Barbie's Doppelgänger
On the subreddit: r/occult, FireofLucifersflame writes: “Barbie fully embraces the role of Sophia / Jesus as the Serpent in the Garden of Eden by incarnating into the world.”
According to the post, this occurs when Barbie exits Barbie Land and enters the “real world,” ie. Los Angeles. Here she is pitted against the “Demiurge,” played by Will Ferrell in the role of CEO of Mattel.
This interpretation may not be too far off base as it turns out the director herself had ambitions to position Barbie as a deity, that is, according to Margot Robbie in an interview with Vogue.
In fact, Robbie compares the treatment for Barbie, written by Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, to “The Apostle’s Creed,” a part of modern Christian liturgy. That is, with a twist. Gerwig stated, "Ken was invented after Barbie, to burnish Barbie's position in our eyes and in the world. That kind of creation myth is the opposite of the creation myth in Genesis."
This was interesting but something gave me the feeling there were deeper layers to the film. Some digging yielded the proverbial Pandora’s Box. Let’s first begin by looking at the little known origin of the Barbie doll itself, recently the subject of an article in the Washington Post entitled, “Barbie’s ‘pornographic’ origin story, as told by historians.”
It was 1956, whilst window shopping in Switzerland with her daughter Barbara, when Ruth Handler first caught glimpse of Lilli. Bild Lilli, as she was named in Germany, was an 11.5 inch doll sporting the features of a full grown woman with puckered lips, platinum hair and lots of eyeliner.
Ruth purchased 11 Lilli dolls straight away and brought them back to California where she lived. Shortly after, she ordered another dozen by airmail. She then took the dolls to Mattel, the toy company she founded in 1945 with her husband and Harold “Matt” Matson.
Ruth, the “mother” of Barbie, was enamored by the doll, telling M.G. Lord, author of Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll, “I didn’t then know who Lilli was, I only saw an adult- shape body that I had been trying to describe for years.”
“They were all horrified by the thought,” she added, “of wanting to make a doll with breasts.”
Ruth and Mattel went to work on transforming Lilli into Barbie. They whitened the skin, softened the eyebrows, strengthened the plastic, etc. Three years later Mattel introduced the Americanized version of the doll, though if you compare Barbie to the original Lillie, they still bare a striking, doppelgänger resemblance.
However, it was her “personality,” if you will, that underwent the most dramatic makeover.
Back in the old country, Lilli was marketed as a sex toy for men in post World War ll Europe. And before she was a three dimensional doll, Lilli was a cartoon character that existed in the two dimensional world of a lewd cartoon.
The character was essentially a high-end German call girl and the cartoon was run in a low brow magazine named Bild Zeitung.
According to Lord, Lillie was a “gold digger, exhibitionist, and floozy,” who had “loose morals, small brains and the body of a calendar girl in the comics, where she was often scantily clothed.”
The cartoon’s story line featured Lillie’s erotic exploits and her never ending pursuit for a “tall, beautiful and rich man.” In one comic, Lillie appears at a female friend’s house wearing nothing but newspaper. In the caption: “We had a fight and he took back all the presents he gave me.”
It was a natural crossover from cartoon character to men’s sex toy. The doll was launched in Germany by Bild on June 24, 1952. According to Lord, men would fondle, pull up the skirt, etc. or hang her from the rearview mirror of their car as decoration.
In The Year 1945
On his blog "The Secret Sun," Christopher Knowles directs us towards the year 1945 for more synchronistic connections between "Barbenheimer" and the occult.
1945 is the year that Robert Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Project detonated the first atomic bomb.
It was the year that Elliot and Ruth (“Mother of Barbie”) Handler founded the Mattel toy company in a garage in Los Angeles.
Also, the Nag Hammadi library gnostic texts were discovered in 1945, near the Upper Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi.
Barbie shares a name with an entity spoken of in the Nag Hammadi, that is "Barbelo," who has been associated with the Whore of Babylon from the Book of Revelations.
A year after the first atomic bomb was detonated, rocket scientist Jack Parsons and writer L.Ron Hubbard (founder of Scientology) conducted a series of magical rituals in the California Desert.
These ceremonies were based on the occult teachings of Aleister Crowley, with the singular goal of incarnating the Whore of Babylon and thus, usher in the New Aeon of Horus.
It is interesting to note that Margot Robbie starred in Babylon, the 2022 film set in 1920s Hollywood depicting that era’s rampant drug excesses and sexual licentiousness.
A tractate from the Nag Hammadi Library, the Apocryphon of John, contains an extensive recounting of the creation myth, with Barbelo described as, "the first power, the glory, Barbēlō, the perfect glory in the aeons, the glory of the revelation.”
It is through Her coaction with God that all creation is manifest. It reads:
“This is the first thought, his image; she became the womb of everything, for it is she who is prior to them all, the Mother-Father(Anthropos), the holy Spirit, the thrice-male, the thrice-powerful, the thrice-named androgynous one, and the eternal aeon among the invisible ones, and the first to come forth.” - Apocryphon of John
Barbelo makes numerous appearances in other Nag Hammadi writings. The Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit speaks of a divine emanation referred to as “Mother,” called the Barbelo.
In Melchizedek, a prayer reads, "Holy are you, Holy are you, Holy are you, Mother of the aeons, Barbelo, for ever and ever, Amen."
Another apocryphal work, though not included in the Nag Hammadi, is the Book of Noria (wife of Noah), a Gnostic text which refers to Barbelo in the context of a Tantric ritual, or Sex Magic if you will. It states:
“For Noah was obedient to the archon, they say, but Noria revealed the powers on high and Barbelo, the scion of the powers—the opposite of the archon, as the other powers are. And she intimated that what has been taken from the Mother on High by the archon who made the world, and others with him—gods, demons, and angels—must be gathered from the power in the bodies, through the male and female emissions.” - Book of Noriah.
Alan Greenfield, in his book The Complete Secret Cipher of the UFOnauts (2018), describes how a being known as the ‘Nor Woman’ is the subject of a short novel by Richard Shaver entitled, “I Remember Lumeria” published by Ray Palmer in Amazing Stories(1948).
In the story, the protagonist Mutan Mion makes a journey into deep space to visit an ancient race of space beings called The Nortans. As Mutan Mion approaches the realm of the Nortans, Shaver notes:
“We were drawn as by a powerful magnet toward a huge figure which was an intense concentration of all vitally stimulating qualities that make beauty the sought for thing that it is . . . All of eighty feet she must have been. She towered over our heads as she rose to greet us, a vast cloud of the glittering hair of the Nor woman floating about her head, the sex aura a visible iridescence flashing about her form.”
Regarding the scant dress of the Nor woman, Shaver notes, “In Nor it is considered impolite to conceal the body greatly, being an offense against art and friendship, to take beauty out of life.”
In the opening scene of the movie Barbie, we see a group of girls playing with dolls in a desert setting. Suddenly, a giant figure rises in the foreground - it is Barbie herself, towering over all like a giantess.
The girls then smash their old fashioned dolls in worship of Barbie.
Is this playful nod to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey a nod to Babylon the Great?
Black Magicians
Greenfield notes that a giant goddess was encountered in 1581 by Dr. John Dee and Edward Kelly, as they conducted a series of Magical Workings to contact Ultra-terrestrial intelligences.
At one point, Kelly accessed the Seventh Enochian Aethyr, wherein he encountered an entity named “DEO.” The impact of this meeting was so intimidating that it sent Kelly fleeing from the art of scrying forever more.
What did Kelly see? It was a being spectacularly large in the form of a beautiful woman. She exuded a tremendous erotic aura and was “beyond good and evil,” in other words, beyond duality.
This Lady said to Kelly: “I am Understanding and Science dwells in me, and the heavens oppress me. They come and desire me with infinite appetite, for none that are earthly have embraced me, for I am shadowed with the Circle of the Stars, and covered with the morning clouds.”
The entity has subsequently become associated with the planet Venus and the seventeenth arcanum of the Tarot (“The Star”). The card is depicted with a nude woman and a star over her head. The star is most probably Sirius.
The Complete Secret Cipher of the UFOnauts describes how Aleister Crowley encountered a similar entity in 1909 while scrying the 9th Aethyr in the Algerian Desert. Crowley writes:
“It is impossible to say anything about her. She is naked; her whole body is covered with fine gold hairs that are the electric flames that are the spears of mighty and terrible angels whose breastplates are the scales of her skin. And the hair of her head, that flows down to her feet, is the very light of God Himself.”
During the Algerian workings, Crowley indicated an encounter he had with a ‘God’ who bore a crown with the stars Orion, Alpha Centauri, the Pleiades, Aldebaran and others.
After this vision, Crowley is transported, by the power of some entity, into an area which Greenfield notes is suspiciously similar to the inside of a space ship as would often be described by contactees.
Crowley calls it a ‘tower’ and within is a ‘chamber’ that is “furnished with maps of many mystical cities. There is a table and a strange lamp that gives light by jetting four columns of vortex rings of luminous smoke.”
On his blog "The Secret Sun," Christopher Knowles quotes Crowley as he meditates on Babylon:
“Memory is blank, and in the most ancient books of Magick are neither words to conjure her, nor adorations to praise her. Will bends like a reed in the tempests that sweep the borders of her kingdom, and imagination cannot figure so much as one petal of the lilies whereon she standeth in the lake of crystal, in the sea of glass.”
It is an impressive allusion to the Whore of Babylon standing in the midst of an atomic “tempest,” with Alamogordo Glass spread at her feet.
Knowles point out how, back in the early years of the Cold War, President Truman ordered the creation of Doom Town, part of Operation Doorstep used in atomic tests to better understand the effects of radiation on people.
Doom Town was not unlike Barbie Land as it featured life-size dolls in make-shift urban settings to replicate typical living arrangements of the 1950s’ family.
Naturally, the outcome of the nuclear explosion would leave the dolls melted and broken in a synchronistic, Bosch-like rendering of Barbie Land.
Twin Peaks
Let’s bring in one more film into our discussion as it may shed some light on our dark topic. That is David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return, specifically Episode Eight.
Here we see the atomic bomb detonated for the first time in 1945, New Mexico. In the void floats a white humanoid form referred to as the Experiment, or “Mother.”
From her mouth spews forth a stream of ectoplasmic fluid and a dark globule containing BOB’s visage mixes in with the burning embers of atomic radiation. BOB, throughout the film series, has been the personification of pure evil itself.
The next scene takes us to another dimension, showing an imposing building with no window perched on a craggy outcropping overlooking a purple sea. Is this a reference to Kenneth Grant's 'Mauve Zone?'
Inside, Senorita Dido sits beside a bell shaped metal object that begins to buzz loudly. A giant enters, switches off the alarm, then goes into a movie theater. On the screen he sees the atomic bomb exploding and the Experiment spewing out BOB.
He starts to levitate then tendrils of light and energy emanate from his head followed by a golden orb of light that contains the face of Laura Palma. After kissing the orb, Senorita Dido sends it to Earth via a gold tube contraption.
Later, we see a strange bug like creature enter into the mouth of an unconscious girl.
It is disturbing imagery but a cinematically beautiful meditation on the ugliness that has infiltrated our world via the explosion of the atomic bomb. The seeding, if you will, of our realm with the demonic offspring of Babylon the Great.
References:
Contributors to Wikimedia projects
Barbie: A Gnostic metaphor
by in occult
Reddit: r/occult
Witney Seibold
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2023/05/25/barbie-trailer-creator-pornographic-origin-doll/
Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll
Contributors to Wikimedia projects
Contributors to Wikimedia projects
Allen H. Greenfield
Carrie Anderson
Contributors to Wikimedia projects.jpg)
Andrew K. Arnett is a writer and producer. He has been published in Paranoia Magazine, New Dawn, Nexus, Konbini and Alien Buddha Press. He lives in Brooklyn, NY and hunts ghosts with the Brooklyn Paranormal Society. Find him on Twitter: @AndrewArnett
