Anticipating Aurora and Beyond

by Loren Coleman ©2012

"What time is it?" ~ Dr. John Watson

"Dawn." ~ Sherlock Holmes

 ~ The Return of Sherlock Holmes, 

"The Man with the Twisted Lip," 1986.

What is next in our dawns? As I have mentioned before, Aurora means "dawn." Unfortunately, I must predict a copycat outburst for Friday, July 27th. More on that in a moment.

First, Holmes appeared on the stage he desired today.

"My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people don't know."
~ Sherlock Holmes, The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, 1892.

James Eagan Holmes' middle name meaning of "fiery" matched his dyed bright reddish-orange hair today, for his first post-massacre appearance. Holmes sat in Judge William B. Sylvester's court on July 23, 2012, in connection with the Aurora, Colorado movie theater massacre Holmes allegedly carried out on July 20th.

Judge Sylvester set July 30th for the filing of formal charges against Holmes. The former neuroscience student at the University of Colorado has been held since Friday in solitary confinement at the Arapahoe County jail in Centennial, about 15 miles south of Denver.

In the court appearance, Holmes seemed in a bizarre trance, nearly Sirhan Sirhan-like. Or Jared Loughner-like. Some felt the genius in the chair was acting. Others saw mind control programming. His hair was dyed an uneven red. The color was faded to a strange pink or an ugly orange in some spots, and, yet, natural brown was visible elsewhere.

When arrested, it has been reported, Holmes said he was the "Joker." In the comics and generally in the Batman and Dark Knight films, the Joker is shown as a green-haired figure.

Cesar Romero (Joker 1966-1968 on television) and James Holmes (2012)

Heather Ledger (Joker 2008)

However, the Joker's costumed henchman often wear orange-red wigs. The Washington Post also correctly pointed out today, "in The Dark Knight, the second film of a Batman series called the Dark Knight trilogy, the Joker character played by Australian actor Heath Ledger wore a nurse's uniform and a red wig in one scene as he destroyed a hospital. Ledger died in January 2008, six months before The Dark Knight was released."

The suspect's name translates as James = "he who supplants," Eagan = "fiery," and Holmes = "holly" and/or "island in the river."

The suspect's genealogy goes back to the beginning of this nation. James' grandmother, Mary Jane Crawford Holmes was descended not only from the Mayflower Pilgrims (she was the governor of the Monterey Bay Colony of Mayflower Descendants), but also was from a member of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Boston, the first American militia.

The Rebirth of Pan and Weird America author Jim Brandon sends me these elusive insights:

Holmes has not been a highly noticeable name of interest, compared with say Fay or Nick, except secondarily in the frequent movie iterations of the British Sherlock Holmes persona, which of course was fictional. But a sensationally fatal real-life eruption occurred in the late 1890s with discovery of the famed "murder castle" in south Chicago. Disguised as a hotel, this was the work of a man who called himself H. H. Holmes and preyed mainly on women attracted to the then popular [1893 Columbian Exposition] World’s Fair, nearby on the lake shore. The total of his victims ranges from a confessed 27 to as high as 200 estimated.
Holmes, whose real name was Herman Webster Mudgett, had started as a medical doctor who however soon showed criminal traits. His “castle” was a virtually surrealistic affair with guest rooms set up with outside door locks, gas jets for asphyxiations and chutes to convey bodies to the basement. The facilities there almost beggar description, employed for corpse dismemberment, dissection of body parts and preparation of skeletons for sale to medical schools or other buyers who can only be imagined.
A number of writers have tackled this story, most recently Eric Larson in [the nonfiction 2003 book] The Devil in the White City, along with others.

Leonardo DiCaprio has purchased The Devil in the White City for a movie in development. DiCaprio's last film was Christopher Nolan's Inception (2010). Nolan is the director of the Dark Knight trilogy.

 

Before James Holmes dominated the news for all of Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of this recently completed weekend in July, the Holmes in the news was Katie Holmes. She is divorcing Tom Cruise, and entertainment news was filled with a Church of Scientology subplot. However, in another thread, what is intriguing is that Katie Holmes was the female lead character (Rachel Dawes) opposite Batman/Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) in the first of the Christopher Nolan Dark Knight trilogy, Batman Begins (2005). 

Katie Holmes as Rachel Dawes in Batman Begins.

It was in Nolan's second installment of the Dark Knight series that a character was created that has caused the copycat evil we are discussing today.

As I have written before, I am concerned about the behavior contagion factor as it applies to the Dark Knight films. Soon after The Joker (played by Heather Ledger) appeared in The Dark Knight, copycats occurred. In The Copycat Effect (NY: Simon and Schuster, 2004), I laid out how visual media has a significant impact on vulnerable homicidal/suicidal individuals who use graphically violent films as models for their own future actions.

The known patterns of copycats are clear. Humans are imprinted with anniversary syndromes and timing markers that seem subtle to most, but are identifiable to behavior scientists, like me. In the case of suicide clusters, school shootings, going postal incidents, workplace violence, and other forms of mass and spree killings, I have ventured forth with predictions, sometimes. I have expectations of how humans react. Often they do. Sometimes they don't. 

After Columbine, over 450 copycat events took place in North America. The CTV published an article about my predictions in 2006. One of the most telling predictions was my sense that something would occur exactly a week after Columbine. It did, when a school shooting happened in Taber, Alberta, only a week later. After Virginia Tech, many quotes of mine were used by the media demonstrating the predictive power of copycat insights.

One quotation haunts me. Here's what I told Seth Borenstein, AP Science Writer, April 20, 2007: "These people are psychologically competing with each other to increase the body count."

The Gothamist looked back to look ahead:

The whole idea of copycats brings us to another [WNYC’s] On the Media interview, this one from October in the aftermath of the Amish school shooting. Then, they interviewed Loren Coleman, a suicide prevention consultant and school violence researcher and author of the book The Copycat Effect: How the Media and Popular Culture Trigger the Mayhem in Tomorrow's Headlines. He was of the opinion that the media’s over coverage of tragedies, starting with the Columbine shootings have set up a model for the later perpetrators of these violent acts. In the interview Coleman noted, “I think that one of the reasons that I wrote my book, The Copycat Effect, was really to try to begin the debate within the media about how much is too much. The graphic details that we see on the cable wall-to-wall coverage and in some other media really sets up a situation where these vulnerable people have a model in front of them to then plan their outrages in a similar fashion. Since August 24th, these individuals have all been males, they've all been Caucasian, they all have been outsiders, either expelled students or older males, and they all have victimized females - young girls, usually – or authority figures, in the case of principals or teachers or guards.”
If you look at some of the Columbine shooter’s videos, which were only released a few years after the fact and only after much legal wrangling, there seems to be a lot of parallels with Cho’s video. Was the oversaturated coverage of these paste events inspiration? It is probable and it is no doubt that Cho’s desire to be heard from the grave was sent to NBC instead of being squirreled away in the case files as has happened in the past. ~ Toby von Meistersinger, "Television Watching: How Much Is Too Much?" The Gothamist, April 24, 2007

In The Copycat Effect, the patterns I found in suicide clusters and school shootings happened over and over again in other kinds of mass shootings. In their most basic blueprint, the copycats take place exactly one week, two weeks, one month, and one year after a massively media-discussed incident of violence. The Aurora red dawn event is the first mass media incident in recent years. Wall-to-wall coverage has occurred, and copycats will happen. The correlation is direct. Why will we be surprised when the next theater shooting takes place?

Look, I predicted that something was going to happen related to the opening of The Dark Knight Rises. Yes, on July 20th. You can read my July 19th pondering about that here.

Therefore, I have to go out on a limb, again. If we get there without a copycat ripple (one seems to have been reported in Maine, already). Law enforcement personnel, movie theater staff, and sports event venue managers need to be aware.

What is the next big event? This is called predictive preparatory planning to understand these patterns.

The two week mark is the weekend of August 3-4-5, 2012. That needs to be watched.

What are the next movie openings of note? Total Recall, Assassin's Bullet, and Soldier's Fortune on Friday August 3, 2012. Gangster Squad (with the film's gangsters shooting up a movie audience!!) on Friday, September 7, 2012. James Bond's Skyfall on Friday, November 9, 2012 (with Aurora in red on the Shanghai skyline).

What is fiction and what is nonfiction? Have the lines blurred? Yes, of course they have.

The copycat effect exists. The Joker is real, because the imaginary villains have become actual ones. A dozen people died in Aurora. The dawn has come, and it is here. We should pay attention. We all have been warned.

I sincerely hope no one else would ever die in another mass shooting. But to be blind to the patterns that are certainly there right in front of us is foolishness.

James Eagan Holmes, mugshot, just released. Taken July 20, 2012.

"When you have eliminated the impossible, 

whatever remains, however improbable, 

must be the truth." 

~ Sherlock Holmes, The Sign of the Four 

Chapter 6: 111, Doubleday, 1890.

Coleman Reese from The Dark Knight, 2005.

"They are trying to kill me." ~ Coleman Reese
"Well, maybe Batman will save you." ~ Commissioner James Gordon

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.}