DeadAgainst

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
 
 

"Hold my head, it's tilting back
Something dancing me around
Putting crystals on my neck
Lifting my feet off the ground"
 
http://www.thefader.com/2014/06/17/love-death-and-jazz-seven-outtakes-from-our-lana-del-rey-intervie/
 
 
"Just like you said
It's all been done before"

"I can be smart when it's important. But most men don't like it."
(Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes)
 

 
 
You have to take me out of this strange trailer park life
 
In the first known performance of "Yayo" in 2006 (? Lanapedia is unreliable on this point), Lizzy stands shrouded in darkness, wearing black. The lyrics are different. Instead of "hello Heaven," we have only (if I hear right) "I think the stars are right about there, but it's gettin' there." She immediately segues into "Pawn Shop Blues". 
 

 
In 2017, “Pawn Shop Blues” became the second song from AKA to be resurrected by Lana Del Rey:
 
 
The video is highly symbolic. Lana appears as a bride, recalling the “Ultraviolence” video. Butterflies are traditionally a symbol of Psyche, the soul; her story is told in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, AKA The Golden Ass, a Platonic allegory wherein the protagonist undergoes “a long journey, literal and metaphorical… He finally finds salvation through the intervention of the goddess Isis”. Lana stands as a pregnant Goddess, Lizzy locked like Snow White in the coffin of the depths from which she must be raised. This is a slight inversion of the usual interpretation: Lana as Self as Goddess cannot be trapped, as she is eternal; she is beckoning her from a higher plane to free her limited self, as seen in Tropico. Cigarettes are the consuming fire in this hermetic vessel that cleanses a tar-black soul.
 
 
Now that we’ve established a rough chronology, it may be possible to read “Get Free” as “her story” depicting the important moments in her recent life:
 
No Kung Fu/The Ocean/Kill Kill/AKA
 
Finally
I'm crossing the threshold
From the ordinary world
To the reveal of my heart
Undoubtedly
That will for certain
Take the dead out of the sea
& the darkness from the arts
 
Born to Die

This is my commitment
My modern manifesto
I'm doing it for all of us
Who never got the chance
For Amy and for Whitney
& all my birds of paradise
Who never got to fly at night
'Cause they were caught up in the dance
 
Paradise

Sometimes it feels like I've got a war in my mind
I want to get off, but I keep riding the ride
I never really noticed that I had to decide
To play someone's game or live my own life
& now I do
I wanna move
Out of the black (out of the black!)
Into the blue (into the blue!)
 
Ultraviolence/Honeymoon

Finally
Gone is the burden
Of the Crowley way of being
That comes from energies combined
Like my part was I
Was not discerning
And you, as we found out
Were not in your right mind
 
Lust for Life
 
There's no more chasing rainbows
& hoping for an end to them
Their arches are illusions
Solid at first glance
But then you try to touch them
There's nothing to hold onto
The colors used to lure you in
& put you in a trance
 
With Lust for Life, she was, as said at the time, jolted back to reality by the Trump presidency. The songs get political, and when she sings of Lady Liberty, there is no hint of acknowledgement of her past usage. This marks the end of what could be considered her “classic” era. Now comes a desire to take off Crowley’s uniform of imagery, strip herself down and rebuild herself anew as one engaged with the world instead of sinking in the quicksand of her thoughts.
 
I go on trips with my friends to the beach who don’t know that I’m crazy.
I can do that.
I can do anything,
Even leave you…
The more I step into my poetry,
The less I will fall into being with you.
 
For the first time since boarding school (according to her), she had real friends; who cares if they’ll never truly know who you are?
 
You, in your madness
The satellite that's constellating my world
Mimicking the inner chaos that i've disowned
A mirror to my past life retribution
A reflection of my sadness...
My feet aren't on the ground
 
Repeatedly in Violet she contemplates grounding herself in the exoteric and turning away from the inner life, particularly in “Never to Heaven,” a sort of modern Ecclesiastes.
 
Norman Fucking Rockwell was a critical triumph, and it was precisely because she stripped herself of overt symbolism, instead relegating it to the lyrical margins and enigmatic images like “God in a burnt coffee pot” that she refused to explain when asked. But the message remains open on the cover and in "Mariners Apartment Complex," the medicine now sugared to go down easier:
 

 
I'm the bolt, the lightning, the thunder
Kind of girl who's gonna make you wonder
Who you are and who you've been...
Maybe I could save you from your sins
So, kiss the sky and whisper to Jesus
My, my, my, you found this, you need this
Take a deep breath, baby, let me in
You lose your way, just take my hand
You're lost at sea, then I'll command your boat to me again
Don't look too far, right where you are, that's where I am
I'm your man
 
Overwhelmingly, the critics finally understood what she was saying when discussing the mundane life, and heralded it as a new triumph in her songwriting when, in many important ways, it was a step back to May Jailer. By doing so, she lost contact with something vital, as she later confessed; suddenly the words did not flow and she turned to poetry as a form of loosening the binds of the unconscious.
 
I'm generally quite quiet
Quite a meditator, actually
I'll do very well down by Paramhansa Yogananda's realization center, I'm sure
 
 
Violet presents some insights into her inner life at this time; the old symbols had been cast away, and new symbols were being modeled. Her verses are on one page allegorical and on another literal, and one is always unsure where the lines are drawn. But when she talks directly to the city of Los Angeles or Kundalini itself, we know that those lines are often crossed. Witness where she flips the tables and refers to literal beings in allegorical terms, the without always being a reflection of the within, the archetypal role in which she is always trapped:
 
What will it take for me not to need you
so I can just have you for fun
and for who you really are
 
Not you as the savior
not me as Ophelia
not us putting our faith in the public's dark art
 
The savior needs no explanation. Ophelia—an image from Paradise, the Self submerged beneath the waters of the unconscious. The public, the dark alchemical art of criticism that tears them apart and puts them together again. ("I get a lot.")
 

 
(Source: Shirley Alvarez)
 
I acknowledged who you really were for the first time.
 
I didn’t call you by any other name, (Axl Rose? Jesus? Jim?)
I let you know that I knew the true nature of your heart.
That it was evil,
and that it convinced me that darkness was real,
That the devil is a real devil,
and that monsters don’t always know that they’re monsters.
 
But projection is an amazing thing.
After you left and burnt the house down,
You tried to convince me it was I who was holding the matches.
 
You told me I didn’t know who I was,
But I do.
 
So when we turn to these lines, is this a real person? Or is this addressed to her own Shadow Self as Dark Animus, that she rejects and yet continually falls into bed with? Is this not her husband from hell?
 
 
 
In a 2007 live rendition of “Pin-Up Galore,” she declares herself both a monster and a being not of this world. The performance is, in a word, strange; she is melancholic, but seems to possess a greater confidence.
 

 
 
The symbolism in "My Bedroom is a Sacred Place Now - There Are Children at the Foot of My Bed" would seem to actually follow that of the Tarot, where the Devil becomes the Tower, the House of Ego destroyed in that all-consuming fire. Elsewhere, she writes in one of her most overtly esoteric pieces, directly addressing the Kundalini serpent—
 
I think about the curse bestowed upon Eve
That fateful eve she took that bite of fruit from that fruitful tree.
And this summer night, you in front of me,
Makes me contemplate the origins of good and evil.
 
This recalls not the Biblical fall, but the awakening that came in the moment that Eve, obeying the serpent, plucked the fruit and attained Gnosis to both the nature of absolute darkness and absolute light (that Sparkle not of this world) in the Abyss. She contemplates if she is, in fact, cursed, having taken the Jump that changed the entire trajectory of her life. A familiar image from Paradise.
 
To shut the door on the past and step
blindly
into the abyss
no destination intact
 

 
 

 
 

 
You're only as happy as your least happy child
 
They don’t understand.
I’m a dreamer.
And I had big dreams for the country.
Not for what it could do, but how it could feel.
How it could think,
How it could dream.
 
I know.
Who am I to dream for you?
It’s just that in my own mind,
I was born with a little bit of paradise.
I was lucky in that way.
Not like my husband,
Who was born and raised in hell.
 
That bit of paradise was not necessarily Lizzy, but Lana Ray who was born on the day she died. Her husband is not strictly the devil of the outer church but akin to the Baphomet of Eliphas Levi.
 
Maybe an artist has to function a little bit above themselves
If they really want to transmit some heaven
 
 
Let me put on a show for you, tiger
 
Her work on Born to Die: The Paradise Edition is characterized by what one would almost call subliminal messages, encouraging the listener to follow her on the Path of Sylvia Plath, all the way from “Take a walk on the wild side” spoken by the Goddess through to “Come to me, baby,” the very last line of Paradise. In early interviews, she is evasive and constantly contradicts herself, as if she is hiding some big secret by claiming to have none--the source of the later backlash. She has the audacity to shave years off of her age and claim "Axl Rose Husband" was written at age 16, a bit of meaningless juvenilia, while striking every mention of that dead phantom known as Lizzy Grant; a creature produced by nature and not by Art. Damnatio memoriae. Is it vanity (years later, she did say, with perhaps some latent guilt, that she always forgets her birth year—but a woman can lie about that), or the realization that such earlier works gave away too much? She needn’t have worried, in the latter case.
 
She shrugs, putting on a ditzy Marilyn Monroe affectation, and says the songs on Born to Die are about nothing much at all, yet strangely gets upset when people treat them as meaningless. By November, the mask starts to slip, but not quite. By the time of Ultraviolence, after a year spent in cruel exile, she contradicts herself again: She doesn’t write pop songs, and never has. Those were psychological. In truth, Born to Die is a perfect and enduring pop record, camouflaged in its intent and designed to embed itself as a seed in the over-culture.
 
I'm just a soul whose intentions are good
Oh Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood
 
It’s apparent that she later came to view this as youthful folly, a naïveté for how little the world would understand her. Perhaps she originally planned to traffic in visions of money, power and glory as some great work of performance art that would be unveiled in Tropico, but that, too, went awry. That latent bitterness and resentment remained, and was behind her frustration that Twigs’ work was considered Art while Tropico was mocked as the work of a whore and not a poet.
 
But... lately I’ve been thinking that I wish
Someone had told me when I was younger
More about the inhabitants that thrive off of paradise.
 
That should they take too much,
There would be nothing left to give.
 
There's something in the water
I can taste it turning sour 
It's bitter
I'm coughing
But now it's in my blood
 
Lately I've been thinking 
It's just someone else's job to care 
Who am I to sympathize
When no one gave a damn
I've been thinking
It's just someone else's job to care
Who am I to want to try...
 
But my heart is very fragile,
and I have nothing left to give.
 
This rejection is what she wishes she had foreseen when younger. She grows tired of attempting to “transmit some heaven” to those who only parasitically consume. In 2019 live performances, her mind seems elsewhere, perhaps even bored. If only she had read the warning of Robert Graves that the Goddess “is hated by saints and sober men.”
 
She said, "You can't be a Muse and be happy, too
You can't blacken the pages with Russian poetry
And be happy"
And that scared me
 
 
This reads like a rather patriarchal and antiquated precept. But it also seems to have been Lana’s intent to embody the Goddess entirely; to be a living Muse. And now, this scares her, because her archetype is also a Goddess of Sorrows, and she stands in the way of happiness. The past years have seen her in seeming rebellion to this role as Muse, stripping away more and more layers of artifice, no longer even wearing makeup. There is a last idol to kill. The idyllic life in Arcadia where it's always 1962 under chemtrails comes to a crashing halt. She now flirts with not the Goddess in her youthful purity, but the Wild Woman, strange and free.
 
The power of youth is on my mind
Sunset, small town
I'm out of time
 
My time has run over, so the only time you'll
Ever see me is in your dreams in my black bathing suit
Lookin' at me lookin' over at you
Real cute, 'cause
He said I was bad, let me show you how bad girls do
 
Time weighs heavy. At her age, David Bowie had already released Tonight and would slide into artistic irrelevance for a decade; Kate Bush, shortly after releasing her Tropico-esque The Line, the Cross and the Curve, had already retired. The Goddess retreats to a land of dreams, but the Wild Woman carries on, and tries to have fun in the meantime.

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