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,
. 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
. 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."
The top numerical candidate, coming into its own, has to be 33.
Thirty-three turns up in some remarkable places.
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.
