Friday, February 19, 2016

Ziggurat to Babylon: The X-Files, 10.5

The X-Files, "Babylon," Season 10, Episode 5.
The fictional Ziggurat incident (a bombing of an art show) was set in Texas, in The X-Files. It was modeled after the Curtis Culwell Center attack carried out by two men who shot at officers at the entrance to an exhibit featuring cartoon images of Muhammad at the Curtis Culwell Center in Garland, Texas on May 3, 2015. The two terrorists were killed by police.

For more content thoughts, see Christopher Knowles' "The X-Files: Babylon Working, or Isis vs ISIS."









Ziggurats







Screenshots of The X-Files' Babylon Motel.


Two Babylon Hotels in the real world.

Tower of Babel/Babylon



Babylon and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon

The episode mentions Dana Scully's thesis as being Einstein's Twin Paradox: A New Interpretation, which we know from "Pilot" and "Synchrony," written in 1986, while Scully was studying at the University of Maryland. Einstein's Twin Paradox: A New Interpretation is about time travel.

I also recommend The Secret Sun Guide to the X-Files Mythology, Parts 1, 2, and 3 by Christopher Knowles.






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2 comments:

  1. Tom Mellett1:58 PM

    The same day you posted this Babylon article, I came across a research article in Numen, an academic journal for the history of religions with this title:

    The Babalon Working 1946: L. Ron Hubbard, Jack Parsons, and the Practice of Enochian Magic

    The next day was the funeral mass for Justice Scalia.

    Looking back to your Scalia article, you added the Scalia Coat of Arms with the “scala” or ladder image in the crest.

    “Scala” in Italian can also mean stairs or stairway, and so, cueing up Led Zeppelin, we might see the soul of Justice Scalia at the requiem Mass clambering up his own “stairway to heaven” = “scala a cielo” maybe “scala per il paradiso”

    But now we can see the Babylon ziggurat as a different kind (on a different “scale?” :-)) of “stairway to heaven.”

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  2. The Secret Sun6:18 PM

    Thanks for the links. As always, Carter is a button-presser and an envelope=pusher. A very strange and symbolically supercharged episode, one I think I've only scratched the surface of. A few days after this aired we saw the story of the ISIS video of an 11 year-old boy sent sent on a suicide bombing mission in Syria. It was eerily reminiscent of the opening scene of Babylon.

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