DeadAgainst

Is there a Joseph Campbellian Monomyth for music? Are Lizzy's ch-ch-changes part of an archetypal pattern, her artistic life unfolding like so many pre-arranged Tarot cards? These are the useless questions I ask to fill my empty life and live vicariously through the more successful.

https://www.lofficielusa.com/music/lana-del-rey-cover-story

I know some might find that interpretation of Born to Die to be a bit out there, but look at this very revealing quote from Lana:
 
 
There's a new revolution
A loud evolution
That I saw
 
Back in 2012, she was still trying to play dumb at being some Marilyn Monroe type. They ask her about metaphysics, and she starts dancing around the subject like it's on fire:
 
 
At the end of the Tropico film, you see them ascending to heaven and flying saucers appear. From what I can gather from the crumbs she's dropped, she wanted the world to attain a higher level of consciousness so they could finally go into space and make alien contact (itself a very New Age idea). "I'm more into SpaceX and Tesla, what's going to happen with our intergalactic possibilities."
 
On Born to Die's meaning, the only lie is one of omission:
 
 
I was so confused as a little child
 
Born of confusion 
And quiet collusion of which
Mostly I've known
 
On how she uses men from her past as archetypal figures in her work (2012):
 
 
On how particular she is about choosing everything in her videos to fit into her archetypal world (2014):
 
 
Cigarettes and Robitussin
Will I ever get to heaven?
 
I’m gentle.
I’m funny when I’m drunk,
But I haven’t been drunk for 14 years.
 
Lana points back to 2006 as being the pivotal year.
 
Hello it's the most famous woman you know on the iPad
Calling from beyond the grave, I just wanna say
"Hi dad"
 
Rob still knows her as Lizzy; does she call him from "beyond the grave" because Lizzy died on the day she saw palm trees in black and white?
 
On how nobody understands her music and she'd like to keep it that way:
 
 

 
Get out of my blood, salamander!...
And yet, everywhere I go, it seems there you are,
And there I am.
 
Before touching on Kundalini in a poem, Lana uses blatant alchemical symbolism with the salamander (called, like Jim, a fire-eater). The salamander being another fire emblem (not the Video Games); the Sulphur as all-consuming fire that is the source of true poetic insight. She would rather keep her inner life private, but the fire in her veins compels her. (Since this part of the board is indexed on Google, maybe I'm even giving away too much? Or maybe this is all just mad ravings.)
 
On fighting her Shadow and monsters:
 
Shaking my ass is the only thing that's
Got this black narcissist off my back
She couldn't care less
And I never cared more
 
In her "Money Power Glory" commentary, she mentions that it was inspired by Carl Jung and the concept of projection--but it also serves as an exorcism of her degenerate beauty queen persona (and let's face it, it was a persona).
 
Monsters still under my bed
That I could never fight off
A gatekeeper carelessly dropping the keys on my nights off
 
What gatekeeper? To what gate? The only one I can remember is from, again, "Bel Air"--
 
Gargoyles standing at the front of your gate
 
 

Strange that she didn't recall the "What is a Youth" song when she seems to reference the lyrics in the "Dark Paradise" demo
 
"What is a youth? Impetuous fire.
What is a maid? Ice and desire."
 
= "I got the ice, you got the fire."
 
Plus Burning Desire, etc.

Baby I've become someone...not of this wooooooorldddd 

I immediately saw that Tennyson's poem is a retelling of the Gnostic Sophia-myth, as some others have divined:
 
http://www.sarastroblake.com/lady.htm
 
 
http://armageddonconspiracy.co.uk/The-Hero-Program(1685768).htm
 
 
The spiritual path of the individual mirrors the cosmic Gnostic creation mythos; in the first, "I'm in love with a dying man" as she plunges into "The Ocean" of the unconscious; in the second, Sophia (the Lady of Shalott) gazes down from the Pleroma into the reflected Kenoma below, and thus projects herself into it, a fate repeated in the career of the individual soul. The Ray being the individual who becomes Rey when she encounters her brunette alter-ego in the World-Soul. This is Eve with the apple in Tropico, the "creaturely Sophia" (Achamoth) who detaches herself from the heavenly Sophia (the red below and the white above) and falls into the land of Gods and Monsters.
  See Quispel (recommended reading): https://books.google.com/books?id=bqRGI6bugRcC&pg=PA50&dq=sophia+mirror+inauthor:quispel&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAGoVChMIvri348nwxwIVSEeICh159gVf#v=onepage&q=sophia%20mirror%20inauthor%3Aquispel&f=false
 
Also Freke and Gandy (other recommended reading): https://books.google.com/books?id=swM_6ufZ2P4C&pg=PA159&dq=sophia+looks+pleroma+mirror&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CEkQ6AEwBmoVChMIp6Hrv8jwxwIVESqICh0ncAl6#v=onepage&q=sophia%20looks%20pleroma%20mirror&f=false
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenoma
 
Ultimate Soul = Pleroma
Ego = Kenoma
 
From the Still Point of the turning world , she watches the Boys who eternally run and return to her.
 
Also http://lanaboards.com/index.php?/topic/6789-freak/
 
Your halo's full of fire I'm rising up, rising up My heart loves full of fire Loves full of fire   Baby if you wanna leave Come to California  Be a freak like me too   
(California being Paradise as the liberated place of the Great Sunshine and hippie freedom lands)
 
http://hermetic.com/stavish/essays/secret-fire.html
 
 

She sort of explained that when she said her songs were "personal" and she didn't want anyone to hear them. And really, I almost feel like my posting about them is a violation of privacy … but it's more interesting than talking about which dresses she's wearing. There is an esotericism beyond orthodox Christianity. 
 
  In order to dismiss all of this, you would have to blatantly ignore what she says … http://www.thefader.com/2014/06/17/love-death-and-jazz-seven-outtakes-from-our-lana-del-rey-intervie/  
 
Sometimes, people confuse their own intellectual apathy with others' … 

A Bible? Probably around this time http://biblehub.com/psalms/146-3.htm
 
http://lanaboards.com/index.php?/topic/5121-lana-del-rey-covers-rolling-stone-august-2014/page-2
 

 
http://www.livereal.com/spiritual_arena/perennial_philosophy_evidence.htm
 
 

 

 
http://www.npr.org/2014/06/21/323209791/lana-del-rey-i-dont-have-other-people-in-mind
 

A lot of this was "just for fun" I admit. But in Tropico she uses these themes in an overt way -- i.e. Adam and Eve as Subject and Object are lost in the land of Gods and Monsters after falling away from Paradise; Eve dons her red party bikini and goes Go-Go Dancer as Adam eats the apple of sensory oblivion, before ultimately passing into a state of regeneration. And what she said of "Video Games" was that the verses were about one relationship, while the chorus was about another relationship altogether. A progression from particular to general. But still wild speculation in the dark.
 
"If you don't get it, then forget it / 'Cause I don't have to fucking explain it" http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/07/09/flannery-oconnor-mystery-and-manners-art/
 
 
"Obviously the quest for peace, the quest for knowledge of something bigger is…that’s the end game. That’s what I’m really interested in."
 
The texts are guideposts to archetypal realities written by other Seers but are not necessarily indicative of what she has read. Jane Leade and Ibn Arabi may not have read each other, either.
 
 
~hunnymoon~

ur not a gangsta
 
as said, i just want you kids to know you stan for a genuine fucking genius, and we don't have that many of them these days
 
 
The Eastern path speaks of an egoless dissolution ("I wish I was dead") ... the Western path speaks of a sort of active participation in the world (it all could happen down on the West Coast; "just do what you love, do it better than") -- yet these two are one
 
 
In other words ... "a Fire for every experience" (FB Dowd)
 

 
The Artist is suspended from a single cord from Above, rather than Below; Lana speaks of being a willing conduit of the invisible
 

 
Mary-Isis-Sophia (etc.) in White speaks to her children ("shared my body and my mind with you"), saying you can be her full-time baby
 
The Spark is divided into pieces in her Eucharist when her living body is broken and shared: "an unfortunate series of events saw those dreams dashed and divided like a million stars in the night sky that I wished on over and over again, sparkling and broken" -- "I know you, I walked with you, once upon a dream ..."
 
The girl in red, the girl in (alchemical) gold, the girl in white -- all these are her, interpenetrating a single soul
 
Inner indecisiveness as wide and wavering as the ocean reflecting the endless USA (Boehme's primordial ground of being)
 

 

 
The ego as Subject observes the Object on the stage, dancing circles around her (hey Orpheus)
 

 
Cut to: Subject and Object are now dancing with each other ("just want it like before, we were dancing all night") ... the Wall is the Law ("got your Bible")
 
By belonging to no-one, she belongs to everyone, and you, too, can be hers, she whispers to those who take a walk on the wild side ("don't be afraid of me, don't be ashamed, walk in the way of my soft resurrection") ... the Lonely Queen will keep waiting

^ Got her bad baby by her heavenly tsela
 
Directly after WITHOUT YOU on BTD is LOLITA ... or is it Lalita, another name for Maya-Shakti??? http://www.shreemaa.org/worship-of-goddess-lalita/
 
 
I wish there was one book I could recommend ... lately I've been reading Frithjof Schuon, who speaks of the Perennial Philosophy -- if one were studying Metaphysics, that would probably be where I would go
 
But in the past it's been people like Alvin Boyd Kuhn, Stephan Hoeller, Carl Jung, Algis Uždavinys, Arthur Waite, Franz Hartmann, Manly P. Hall, etc. and whatever I could find in English on Kabbalah -- none are easy reads but I find I have actually understood them more through the lens of Lana's work, intentionally or not on her part
 
But perhaps the source of her knowledge is summed up in the passage from Psalm 51 that she flashes during "Body Electric": "Behold, thou lovest truth in the inward affections: therefore hast thou taught me wisdom in the secret of mine heart."

SHADES OF COOL VIDEO
 
The girl in white and the girl in red, Mary and Eve. Soul approaches Ego (Last Year's Man), living in Shades of Cool. His heart is unbreakable. Note Lanz repeatedly gesturing over her heart.
 

 
The Subject observes the girl in her red party dress as the Object -- the Dark Horse is her sensual Black Beauty (life is beautiful, but you don't have a clue)
 
Lana's concern is with the union of Subject and Object that comes from crossing the Abyss; Body, too, is part of Soul (as she said via Whitman)
 
Shiva and Shakti
 

 
Daddy says we're all one, but there seems to be an awful lot of space Within You and "Without You"
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/15/arts/music/lana-del-rey-still-stirs-things-up-with-ultraviolence.html
 
 

 
"jumping into the Abyss"
 
 

 
 
"You have to take me from this dark trailer park life right now . . ."
 
Lizzy pricks her finger on the Still Point of the Spinning Wheel and "dies" her hair a darker shade of brown
 
http://www.sacred-texts.com/oto/engccxx.htm
 
 

 
"I'm lying in the ocean, singing your song
Ahhh, that's how you sang it

Loving you forever, can't be wrong
Even though you're not here, won't move on
Ahhh, that's how we played it

And there's no remedy
For memory
Your face is like a melody,
It won't leave my head
Your soul is haunting me
And telling me
That everything is fine
But I wish I was dead
(dead like you)"
 
http://www.mythsdreamssymbols.com/animaanimus.html
 
 

 
"I can hear sirens, sirens"
 

 

 

 
Eve's apple becomes the strawberry of initiation (a nod to Katy's "Wide Awake" video? perish the thought); the instrument of the Fall becomes the instrument of the Gnostic Regeneration

I guess my reasoning was that if Lana in white is Mary, then her Daddy must be "Dear John" by default . . .
 
"Now I'm in LA and it's Paradise"
 
There is some merit to interpreting UV as being about her musical career as well; this seems to be part of her design to turn her life into a work of Art, by which she seems to mean a work of poetic alchemy (thus the flames as she sways on the SNL stage--stumbling on the way to Golgotha, as you say).
 
"Three years down the line of being on an endless world tour"--well, she hadn't been on an endless world tour for three years when she said that; she is obviously referring to a spiritual path (feet, don't fail me now) rather than anything literal. Fuck your way to the top.
 
"And if I said I didn't plan for it to turn out this way, I'd be lying ..."
 
"No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself ..."

On the balcony, overlooking the world = Lana in white (higher Mary-Sophia) with her "Daddy" character as God (YHWH, "Our Father, whose Art's in heaven"), riding her throne-chariot through the heavens ...
 

 
Lana in red (lower Eve-Sophia) as the "Girl on Fire," the Phoenix in flames. ("Phoenix" = "palm tree.")
 

 
The final scene shows Christ crucified with Lana as Sophia overshadowing him in her soft resurrection.
 

 
She is seen in the flames in red before turning to black leather--the Nigredo when she puts on her black wedding dress.

I think "West Coast" has a lot to do with this poem Barrie posted on FB: https://www.facebook.com/nightmareboybjo/posts/413946528751206

"She's a drunk bitch
he's a drunk cunt
she's so lonely now he's gone
he's day dreaming of his new gun
she's a feeling his only one

burn me a liar
want to die in a fire
holy and wired
addicted to liars

Pontius pilate serve me a sin
be my next of kin
broken by her violent hymn
she thinks he's jesus crying within

serve him a sire
he wants to die in a fire
holy and wired
addicted to liars
burn me a liar
i want to die in a fire
buried in fire
addicted to liars

my girl she burns her lover and
she says something as he's on fire and
my girl she burns her lover and
says something like love"



"Chelsea Hotel #2" appears on this Leonard Cohen album, whose cover features "an image from the alchemical text Rosarium philosophorum"

"You're the King
My fear baby
I'm the Queen of Alchemy
I know a way to make gold by mixing our souls to escape reality"

Lana, as she told us in "Heavy Hitter," is the Queen of Alchemy, and her work must be interpreted in this context. She is burning her lover (and/or the listener) in the alchemical fire, purging away his impurities and symbolically "killing" the lower self so that it may be reborn as a Phoenix.

The first stage of Alchemy is the Nigredo, in which the sun of day-consciousness figuratively is immersed in the darkness of the lower world, interpreted in both its macrocosmic and microcosmic aspects as the soul descending into body and the consciousness descending into the unconscious waters of the psyche, respectively. This is the sun setting in the "West" to make the night-journey through the Underworld.

"Down on the West Coast, they got a sayin'
If you're not drinking, then you're not playing
But you got the music, you got the music in you, don't you?

"Down on the West Coast, I get this feeling, like
It all could happen, that's why I'm leaving you for the moment, you for the moment, boy blue, yeah, you..."

"Down on the West Coast, they got their icons
The silver starlets, their queens of Saigons
...they love their movies
Their Golden Gods and rock 'n' roll groupies
And you got the music, you got the music in you, don't you?"

Los Angeles is the Gateway to the Underworld, as she said in Tropico. The Land of Gods and Monsters is an inverted reflection of the higher spiritual reality of the world of forms, where all of the "Golden Gods" and "Silver Starlets" dwell in their own false Paradise. Here one is subjected to spiritual intoxication and occlusion that dulls the senses. Lana, as the Alchemical Queen, has descended into this world as a Ray of light broken off from the Divine, here to alchemically transform the lower world into a true image of the eternal Paradise; she as Soul is the "music" in her lover as Ego that will transform him from the dead to the living.

"You're falling hard, I push away
I'm feeling hot to the touch
You say you miss me and I wanna say, "I miss you so much"
But something keeps me really quiet"

This ties into the symbolism of "Black Beauty," in which Lana as Soul paints herself black in the Nigredo stage of the work, when the alchemical fire turns all to ashes; she no longer speaks to her lover and he is left seemingly alone in his Dark Night of the Soul.



"I can see my baby swinging, his Parliament's on fire and his hands are up
On the balcony and I'm singing, ooh baby, ooh baby, I'm in love
I can see my sweet boy swinging, he's crazy and Cubano como yo, my love
On the balcony and I'm swaying, move baby, move baby, I'm in love, I'm in love, I'm in love, I'm in love, I'm in love"

Lana repeats the familiar trope of separating herself into two characters in the verse-chorus structure; here she stands as the Higher Sophia, in distinction from the Lower (the White and Red girls as Soul and Body, Mary and Eve), who declares her love as her "baby" burns himself in the alchemical fire. In Barrie's "Mary," we see Mary on a balcony as the Mother Goddess, overlooking the mortal child who wishes to approach her divinity.

"Would you kill for me? Would you die for me?

Put your hands where I can see them,

Put them in the air."
 
And if it seems strange that she would personify herself as a goddess . . .
 
"I want to be the whole world's girl, gramma
Tell me do you think that's wrong?

"Don't cry, honey, crazy girl
Don't you know you are the world?
Every time you feel unsure
Try to remember what you are"

omnipotent shapeshifting goddess confirmed

This is what the original uploader (who has only ever uploaded one torrent, despite being on the site since 2005) says of the NKF demos on Dimeadozen.org
 

 

 
Maybe you Lizzy scholars knew this though

I'm guessing the song is about her fans (it's all for you): http://radio.com/2014/06/12/lana-del-rey-interview-maleficent-ultraviolence/
 
 
Young, wild, free -- dancing circles around her, crazy for her
 
The "red party dress" is a repeating signifier of being an Object perceived by numerous Subjects. "The roses had the look of flowers that are looked at."

^ Got her bad baby by her heavenly tsela
 
Directly after WITHOUT YOU on BTD is LOLITA ... or is it Lalita, another name for Maya-Shakti??? http://www.shreemaa.org/worship-of-goddess-lalita/
 
 
I wish there was one book I could recommend ... lately I've been reading Frithjof Schuon, who speaks of the Perennial Philosophy -- if one were studying Metaphysics, that would probably be where I would go
 
But in the past it's been people like Alvin Boyd Kuhn, Stephan Hoeller, Carl Jung, Algis Uždavinys, Arthur Waite, Franz Hartmann, Manly P. Hall, etc. and whatever I could find in English on Kabbalah -- none are easy reads but I find I have actually understood them more through the lens of Lana's work, intentionally or not on her part
 
But perhaps the source of her knowledge is summed up in the passage from Psalm 51 that she flashes during "Body Electric": "Behold, thou lovest truth in the inward affections: therefore hast thou taught me wisdom in the secret of mine heart."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Jones
 

Just like how "Video Games" is the first song she ever wrote

"Freedom comes from the call..."
 
https://knpr.org/npr/2018-02/lana-del-rey-world-cafe
 
I want to end with the song that ends the record, "Get Free." You sing, "This is my commitment / My modern manifesto / I'm doing it for all of us / Who never got the chance." Never got the chance to what?
For Amy [Winehouse], and for Whitney [Houston]. "And all my birds of paradise / Who never got to fly at night, / 'Cause they were caught up in the dance." It's about people who don't get to reach their full potential because they let controlling people stop them from being free.
 
It has a line that's so evocative: "I wanna move out of the black, into the blue." I'm wondering what the black is and what the blue is.
Well, in my head, the black was negative thinking, and the blue was a bit of a retreat into nature. So visually, I was thinking the ocean, but also just the connotation of the words: I think of the sky, like a new horizon, something fresher.
 
What's the key to getting free?
I think going deeper, you know? Knowing that you're your own doorway to the answers and not looking for answers in other people.
 
 
"When I was writing that song, I had a little conversation with my engineer, who's one of my dear friends; his name's Kieron Menzies. And we were talking about this model they use in literature; sometimes it's called the Hero's Journey. And it starts with crossing the threshold of the ordinary world and moving to the main character's reveal of the heart. And then the character goes through all these different cycles; they battle the giant, they battle themselves, and then they come back and they find out who they really are. And so I liked that idea. I thought it sort of resembled my story. (Inaudible), I revealed my heart. And then the rest is a Mystery. All I'll say."
 
What did she say in the inaudible part?

Manchildren on the Internet call this "The Wall" and have spilled much ink on its intricacies
 
Get married or get right