Wikileaks and the Search for a Cryptographic Mythology

A little later in the same document, he quotes from the Enuma Elish, and the phrases given above appear in the quoted excerpts from that text – although they are not present in the version “Based on the translation of E. A. Speiser, with the additions by A. K. Grayson, Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, third edition, edited by James Pritchard (Princeton, 1969), pp. 60-72; 501-503, with minor modifications” that Assange offers us on the sibling-page at Enuma Elish.

As Dr. Rosenberg pointed out to me, “the quote — if it is a translation — differs from other translations I found on the Internet. It is more specific and extensive and ‘mythological.'”

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Okay, I’ve kept what may be the most practical (ie 21st century) “creative leap” made by my skittish and wandering mind for this, my penultimate paragraph.

Oxford’s Anders Sandberg blogs today about Assange’s application of network theory to conspiracies, quoting Assange as saying:

Conspiracies are cognitive devices. They are able to out think the same group of individuals acting alone Conspiracies take information about the world in which they operate (the conspiratorial environment), pass it around the conspirators and then act on the result. We can see conspiracies as a type of device that has inputs (information about the environment) and outputs (actions intending to change or maintain the environment).

And Anders’ summary of Assange’s position? “In short, conspiracies are a kind of collective intelligence enhancement.”

[ admission: I associate the name Anders Sandberg with some brilliant early net writings on role-playing games and the hermetic tradition – I’m hoping this is the same guy ]

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Finally, let’s go back to that enhancement of the Enuma Elish text. That phrase, “Sealed the Ancient Ones in their Caves, behind the Gates” struck me, too – it reminded me of the Chthulu Mythos of HP Lovecraft, and its apocalypse:

That cult would never die until the stars came right again and the secret priests would take Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild, and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.

And with that quote from Lovecraft, courtesy of Erik Davis, we have returned by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to the hermetically sealing and revealing world of John Dee.

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3 comments on this post.
  1. Curtis Gale Weeks:

    And Anders’ summary of Assange’s position? “In short, conspiracies are a kind of collective intelligence enhancement."

    I have lately been mulling the use of the term "distributed cognition", with reference to some of my recent posts on the WOODA, Social WOODA, and especially on the subject of performativity.

    .

    To leap from that specifically to a 5GW consideration:  the ability to align abstracts ("Mental Constructs") in a sufficiently large group of individuals may suggest a corresponding ability to focus activities ("Acts" which shape the "World") in such a way as to change the world more effectively than merely allowing the chips to fall as they might.  To some degree, this is a role that various social organizations have always filled, whether tribe or city-state or nation-state (and perhaps, corporations), at least to the degree that they could obtain and maintain "conspiracy" or a similar and homogeneously-held worldview (even if the groups and individuals in those organizations held many other views at variance within the organization.)

  2. John Griogair Bell’s Blog » links for 2010-12-03:

    […] zenpundit.com » Blog Archive » Wikileaks and the Search for a Cryptographic Mythology "Jean Rosenfeld of the UCLA Center for the Study of Religion just posted a comment on an earlier Zenpundit post of mine, opening up a topic which may interest some readers here: that of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s mythological associations." (tags: myth storytelling technology) Share and Enjoy: […]

  3. links for 2010-12-05 | zota:

    […] Wikileaks and the Search for a Cryptographic Mythology The third name is MARUTUKKU, Master of the arts of protection, chained the Mad God at the Battle. Sealed the Ancient Ones in their Caves, behind the Gates. (tags: paranoia conspiracy wikileaks mythology) […]