Nintendo World Order (Demon Sword and Desert Commander)

One of the greatest pleasures of being a postmodernist occultist academic is that there are actually people in the world who essentially believe me to be a super-villain. There is almost nothing quite as satisfying as sitting on the sofa with a cup of tea and my dog, petting him and watching a movie, and quietly being vilified by a substantial segment of the population as the living embodiment of pure evil.

As a result of this, one of my great guilty pleasures is insane occultist conspiracy theories. Which, I suppose, I should offer some favorite examples of. I adore Vigilant Citizen, in no small part for its slogan "Symbols rule the world, not words or laws," which is a charming example of accuracy hiding in a deeply improbably place. EnigmaTV remains a favorite, mostly due to this (NSFW) DVD cover. And of course there's Hollywood Insiders, who manage the difficult task of finding occult symbolism in Alan Moore comics.

It is in that spirit, then, that I bring you Demon Sword and Desert Commander, two games I will be talking about in my formal capacity as super-villain and ringleader of the New World Order. This will be the only formal reply that the Illuminati will be making to those who have caught on to our widespread use of occult symbols throughout the culture, so really, you should listen up closely. This entry could change your life.

First of all, because I know these two games are not on a lot of people's radar, let me save you guys the task of finding the major occult symbolism in them. Let me preface this with a quick cautionary note. You guys do an excellent job of finding occult symbolism. The problem is, the occult symbolic language is so broad that you get a lot of false positives. For instance, Vigilant Citizen - great job uncovering what we did with the Bank of America murals. That was really thorough. But the little digression about the Black Sun? Yes, you're absolutely right that the Black Sun, traditionally symbolized by Da'ath, the lost sephira, is the hidden counterpart to the golden dawn and that the Goetic magical tradition seeks to understand this lost form of knowledge through contemplation of the fundamental dualism of reality so as to ascend to godhod. Spot on. Unfortunately, the black sun's symbol - a black circle - is ridiculously common. So while you're spot on about the black sun on Bracken House, the one in the Denver Airport? That one's actually just a black circle. Sorry.

Which is to say, this is not a complete index of the occult symbolism in either of these games. It's just a complete index of the occult symbolism we actually intended in them. Now, video games were tricky for us. It took a long time for the graphics to get good enough to be worth it. You've no idea how hard it is to make a unicursal hexagram look good on the Atari 2600. So in the games themselves, we were a bit limited. We mostly had to work with the box art. On the NES, we could start working with title screens, and that was good. Take Demon Sword.

I'm really proud of this one. The forking sword was, if you'll excuse the self-pride, a real work of art. Totally useless as an actual weapon, right? Ah, but look - first of all, three sets of two prongs - a clear reference to the Kabbalistic tree of life. It also evokes the Ace of Swords in the Rider-Waite Tarot, and the lightning bolt image. Plus, you've got the basic symbolism of swords - representing Air and reason. So a demon sword is a clear reference to how we've perverted human reason and science, rendering the Lord's gift of reason and intellect into Satanic monstrosities that lead mankind astray. This is another reason the sword has six prongs - because in the Crowley-Harris Thoth Tarot, the Six of Swords is renamed Science, which is, of course, the most Satanic form of reason. So yeah. Basically, Demon Sword, right from its title screen, is an allegory about how science perverts faith. Awesome, right? Thanks.

Meanwhile, Desert Commander. Oh man. Once again, not to pat ourselves on the back too much, we nailed this one. Pyramid? Check. Black pentacle? Check. Aleister-Crowley-esque figure tracing an Eye of Horus into a checkerboard laid out over the desert? Check. Explosion that resembles the Chaosstar? Yep. Black sun in the gun of the tank? Uh-huh. That said, the propellers on the planes that are obviously in the wrong position causing them to appear to be the Thaumaturgic Triangle? Yeah, that one was the artist screwing up. We just wanted airplanes cause we thought they looked cool.

Now, of course, you could have figured all of that out. The last thing you needed was us to spell it out for you. Really, those last two paragraphs were just for people who might not be as keyed in to occult symbolism as you are. Not 9/11-Aware, as you so often put it. Sorry to insult your intelligence. So, having sorted all of that out, let's get to the really big question - the one none of your vast amounts of research into the occult (and it really is vast - you actually have more thorough dictionaries of occult symbols than we do!) has managed to come close to explaining: Why is the secretive cabal running the world going about sticking widely recognized occult symbols in silly video games? How does that advance our evil plans?

You've really got no idea here. The best you can come up with is something like this - the idea that symbols, when charged with will harnessed in a suitably occult fashion, can alter material reality. Which, of course, they can. Everybody knows that. So yes, it's absolutely the case that we could, if we wanted to, unleash a vast set of occult symbols in popular media, all charged with mystical energy to bring about a Satanic transformation of consciousness in the world. But as you guys love to point out, we're also really good at mind control. Why would we take the long way of, essentially, sigil magic when we could just control your mind, eh? And for that matter, if we wanted to unleash magical symbols into popular media, why would we pick recognizable and traditional occult forms? Why use the Proctor and Gamble logo, which everyone immediately recognizes as Satanic, when we could just use the Facebook logo. Even more widely seen these days, and unlike, say, the Target logo (an obvious reference to Baphomet), nobody knows it's Satanic. Not that, you know, we did that.

I obviously don't want to deny your central premise. After all, you've been so on target for the most part. (But seriously, Mr. Everard, the aliens that created the Kabbalah do not look like that) Which is to say, the answer to the question is still hidden in the secretly Satanic works themselves. Because, as I think we both agree, a symbol for something still contains the whole of the meaning of what it symbolizes. So if, as we are both stipulating, Desert Commander and Demon Sword is full of Illuminati symbols, one of the things we can interpret from Desert Commander and Demon Sword is the actual plot of the Illuminati, as every symbol contains the complete information of its signified.

Let's move beyond the box art then. Demon Sword is a fairly straightforward side-scroller. It suffers from what I have often described as sloppy controls - your character has substantial acceleration and deceleration to deal with, your attacks do not affect enemies intuitively, and the jumping mechanics... actually, the jumping mechanics are just about the only interesting thing about this game. Because your character can jump. Actually, your character can damn near fly. The easiest way to handle the levels, by far, is to just jump. Constantly. And hit occasional enemies out of the sky with your sword.

The message here should be completely clear to you lot. The alliance of the sword and the air is already implicit in basic alchemical symbolism. The claim is obvious - that human reason and intellect are the way through. Now, the question is whether this is a demon sword - i.e. that reason is going to lead you to ruin - or a sword that slays demons - i.e. that reason will liberate you. The title screen and box art suggested the former. But nothing within the game suggests that the religion being overthrown by reason is a Christian one. Indeed, the game is clearly set in Japan, and it is traditional Shinto demons that are being overthrown.

Reason, in other words, is being used to stop the very demons you usually assume we are working with. Let's turn now to Desert Commander. Yet another turn-based strategy game. (We need an acronym for this. YATBSG. No, never mind. We don't.) The desert in question is clearly the Sahara. So we're dealing with Egypt here. Egyptian mythology is integral to the Hermetic tradition, which traces its roots back to Hermes Trismegistus, a syncresis of Hermes and the Egyptian Thoth. These are gods of reason. Further investigation of the cover confirms this - the figure of the head divides the pyramid so as to form the alchemical symbol for air. So again, we are in the territory of reason. But here reason is expressed in the form of war - military tactics.

Reason, embodied by the sword, as an instrument of war against false gods. But the exact nature of this war is a somewhat tricky business. In the case of Demon Sword, it appears to be a war of destruction, with the goal being to overthrow the demons. In the case of Desert Commander, it is a war of conquest, with the goal being to possess the land of the gods. What, exactly, are we doing here?

Ask this question - is a monotheistic view of Christianity possible if one believes in the occult? Not if one practices it - that question is obvious. My question is subtler and perhaps more alarming. Can one who believes in the occult conspiracy theories we've been discussing also be a Christian in the evangelical American sense of that word? I would suggest that the answer is no, because no adequate solution to the Problem of Evil can be derived within this set of axioms. The only suitable solution for the Problem of Evil within the Christian tradition your conspiracy theories stem from is that evil comes from human weakness. But if the Illuminati is proceeding via mind control expressed via symbols, human weakness is not sufficient to explain evil. Evil, it seems, is capable of propagating automatically through symbolic spawning. In other words, if one believes in the occult as a source of evil, one renders evil as a sort of mind-virus - an evil meme.

But if we adopt this disease method of evil, God becomes strangely powerless. God offers little to no resistance against mind-virus evil. He seems mostly capable of giving his followers the ability to identify the mind virus. But most lists of occult symbols include the cross. In other words, in this view, God is wholly deprived of any symbolic methodology with which to combat the occult. To posit the existence of the occult in this fashion is, in other words, to delineate powers as inaccessible to God.

Consider that possibility. Occultism dethrones the idea of an authoritarian god. This does not dethrone Christianity, of course. It merely dethrones the forms of Christianity that envision God as little more than a vengeful sky fairy. So long as one envisions a form of Christianity in which human reason is capable of manipulating instead of simply obeying symbols, i.e. one in which the human faculties of reason and free will are given substantial power, occultism, even if it is rejected as evil or un-Christian, is not a significant threat, it's mere silliness.

This is our true demon sword. Our true goal. And to the many skeptics who (quite reasonably) point out that it is extremely unlikely that the pentagram under the White House will make the President into a servant of the Devil, I say only this - you miss the point of our methodical laying out of the symbols in the first place. The possibility of their working is only slightly more ludicrous than the possibility that we put them there in the first place.

But if our melange of symbols forms a labyrinth in which totalitarian gods can be imprisoned, but in which the glorious play of reason can soar.