Tom Cruise: 33° of Separation

Sometimes Perez Hilton gets it, even though how he stumbles into it seems a wonder to behold. Let's take the case of Tom Cruise and his now forthcoming divorce from Katie Holmes. We don't have any choice but to do a bit of synchromystic, Fortean detective work about this seemingly tabloid story. There is more here than meets the eye. First, here is the splashy news.

Not burying the lead at all, Hilton penned a short alert over the weekend, entitled "Tom Cruise Marriages End When Wives Are 33, Scientology Established On 33rd Parallel!"

Tom Cruise has had three wives. Hilton states it quickly and factually that Cruise,

wed MiMi Rogers in May of 1987, but they broke up in 1990… when she was 33. Then he moved on with Nicole Kidman. They were happy for ten years but guess what! They split when she was 33 too! And now, just a day after her divorce announcement, Katie Holmes has 33 years under her belt.

Perez Hilton, however, missed at least one. 

Cruise had a relationship with his Risky Business co-star Rebecca de Mornay; they cohabited in New York from 1983 through 1985. She was born in 1952 (the daughter of Jane Eager and Hot Seat talk show host Wally George, who was copycatted by Jerry Springer and others following its 1983 creation). De Mornay was 33 when she broke up with Cruise in 1985!!!

Cruise also had a relationship with Penelope Cruz that ended in 2004. She would have been 31 years old (unless she's lying about her age in her official bios, which she denies going to do in the future).

Tom Cruise's birthday is July 3, and he will be exactly 50 years old this year.

Two other well-known actors are born exactly on the same day (July 3, 1962) as Tom Cruise:

Aaron "Hotch" Hotchner (Thomas Gibson) on Criminal Minds.

Synchromystically, Gibson made his big-screen debut as Tom Cruise's nemesis and chief rival for Nicole Kidman’s affections in Far and Away, Ron Howard’s 1992 epic about Irish immigrants settling in the New World.

Dr. Taylor Hayes (Hunter Tylo) on The Bold and The Beautiful.

It does seem to be beyond a coincidence that Cruise would experience breakups with four women in their 33rd year of life. What's going on here?

"Watch Katie Holmes and Scientology story develop. Something creepy, maybe even evil, about these people."

~ Tweeted from Rupert Murdoch, Sunday, July 1, 2012.

Perez Hilton relates the significance of "33," in some unexplained fashion, to Cruise's love of Scientology, saying he found that

the Hubbard Association of Scientologists, the forerunner of the Church of Scientology, was established in Phoenix, Arizona. And Phoenix lies on the 33rd parallel. Hmm… 

The godfather of synchromysticism James Shelby Downard first made many of us aware of the significance of the number 33 and its specific magic along the 33rd parallel, in 1979, via the short underground classic, The Masonic Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. It has a lot to do with the 33rd degree of Freemasonry, apparently.

Downard's “King-Kill/33: Masonic Symbolism in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy” eventually was published by Ritual America's Adam Parfrey as a chapter in the first edition of the book Apocalypse Culture. A shortcut spoiler is that the essay theorizes the Freemasons were responsible for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in a specific ritual related to "killing the King."

Jim Brandon, writing even before Downard's work was published, was able to walk a wonderfully skeptical open-minded fence, as he passed along the following summary of Downard's JFK insights in Weird America in 1978:

Would you believe John F. Kennedy as a ceremonial king-who-must-die? I'm afraid there is a certain body of opinion, undoubtedly the farthest-out brain wave of assassinology yet, that maintains the killing was pulled off, not by the Russians, the Cubans, the CIA, or the Mafia, but by alchemists.
As I understand the hypothesis, President Kennedy was for some reason chosen as The King (remember "Camelot," "Macbird" and all that?) after the fashion of James G. Frazer and Mary Renault whose "The King Must Die" he had been given to read before his death. This killing of the king in Dallas was related somehow to the touching off of the world's first atomic bomb at the Trinity Site in New Mexico 18 years earlier. Apparently the Bomb was the "destruction of primordial matter" stage of the grand alchemical working, but these conspiracy buffs aren't much more specific on details than were the early alchemists in their recipes. Anyway, Kennedy represented the next stage of the process - the "Death of the White King" - when he was immolated on a trinity site of his own. For, aren't Dealey Plaza and the ill-famed Triple Underpass on the bank of the old Trinity River?

~ Jim Brandon

Popular cultural outlets, such as Robert Anton Wilson's works (e.g. Cosmic Trigger), the music of Marilyn Manson (e.g. King Kill 33), and the various books and movies about the numbers 23 and 33, have Downard's insights influencing a broader audience. My own books, including The Copycat Effect, show the readers various purple shades of Downard.

Developing from this, then, is that severals writers have the sense they "discovered" the significance of certain names or dates, or even factoids like Dealey Plaza being near the 33° north latitude and it being the first Masonic temple in Texas. Remarkably, most of the hints to these revelations track directly back to Downard.

Downard showed clearly the linkages between the mystical landscape and the 33° latitude. Intriguingly, more awareness of the Fayette Factor seems in play than any longterm knowledge of the 33° parallel or of 33 as a harmonic digit. More people follow the 23 "coincidences," in the numbers arena than they do "33."

But this might change. Jim Brandon penned the following thoughts in his 1983 book, The Rebirth of Pan: Hidden Faces of the American Earth Spirit: "...there are certain numbers entangled with certain phenomena...."

The top numerical candidate, coming into its own, has to be 33.

Thirty-three turns up in some remarkable places. 

The unnatural nature of the 33° alignments is well-discussed in the synchromystic world. See, for example, the wild and weird, from Red Ice Creation's "Along the 33rd Parallel: A Global Mystery Circle" to Scoreboard Canada's "The 33rd Parallel: Masonic Line of Death...." and Hidden Mysteries' "Masons and Mystery at the 33rd Parallel."

All kinds of associations have been made with the 33rd Parallel: pyramids, death rows, ufo crash sites, Trinity Atomic Bomb test site, the starting site of the Scottish Rite in America, the first shots of the Civil War at Fort Sumter, and various assassination-assassination attempt locations (from Jesus to JFK & RFK, from Captain William Morgan to Gabrielle Giffords). Why should we be surprised by the Tom Cruise-Scientology 33rd degree speculations? Some of the linkages do have a basis in popular cultural fact.

Take for instance, the name "Hobbs," which is a "devil's name," a word based on a demonic origin. Hobbs had been the location of UFO sightings in the 1950s and 1960s. Hobbs, New Mexico, near the 33 degree latitude, has experienced a never-ending stream of UFO encounters since Bill Watson's April 1955 sighting became known in ufology as the "Hobbs Incident." This Southwest corner of New Mexico is a hotbed of so-called flying saucer activity with the most famous event being the "Roswell Incident." Allegedly, as is well-known today, a UFO crashed in nearby Roswell, New Mexico, on July 8, 1947, and the US Air Force recovered small bodies from the craft, according to numerous ufological researchers. The entire use of the term "little green men" appears to have been added to American slang by way of the incidents taking place in the Hobbs-Roswell area in 1947.

Trinity Site Obelisk - National Historical Landmark

Trinity was the code name of the first detonation of a nuclear device. This test was conducted by the United States Army on July 16, 1945, in the Jornada del Muerto ("single day's journey of the dead man") desert about 35 miles southeast of Socorro, New Mexico (site of Lonnie Zamora CEIII 1964 incident - pictured) at the White Sands Proving Ground; Trinity took place on the 33rd Parallel. Considering the background to the name "Hobbs," such events are not too shocking.

Perez Hilton is on to something, no matter how sensational people might think his "news." The word "synchromysticism" was first coined by Jake Kotze in August 2006, on his website-at-the-time, Brave New World Order. Kotze defined the concept as: "The art of realizing meaningful coincidence in the seemingly mundane with mystical or esoteric significance." Who are we to deny the fact these things come to us in all kinds of different ways?

In the wake of James Shelby Downard, are we now to understand that Tom Cruise and Scientology have realized the synchromystical magic of the number 33 and the 33° latitude? Ah, The Master is on its way! All shall be revealed, in the coming months, humm?

{Photo credit for top image, Perez Hilton/Will Alexander/WENN. Thanks to The Anomalist's Chris Savia & his wife for the news tip about the Perez Hilton hint.}