Monday Movie ~ The Seventh Sign & Seven Seals

In May 2009 I wrote a post about a movie we'd watched via a cheapo VHS tape:
The Seventh Sign. I began:

Transiting Jupiter and Neptune are now close enough (2 degrees) to be considered conjoined. Jupiter represents religion, among other things. Neptune relates, among other things,to imagination.

It could be coincidental that as Neptune, now transiting Pisces, conjoins my own natal Jupiter at 6 degrees, I should come back to this post. What sent me searching for it were my ponderings on thoughts leftover from the weekend's post on possible future climate catastrophe, with its potential as a path leading to...well, "The End". I feel that hope is something we should nurture in such situations, even in the face of severe threat.

An edited version of the 2009 post, which I still find of interest; followed by some additional information:

Last night I had a kind of Jupiter/Neptune-ish experience watching an old movie, dating from 1988: The Seventh Sign, with Demi Moore. Moore is very pregnant in the movie.

The theme of the movie is apocalypse and Bible horror. Made in the 1980s, its references and flavour are somewhat different from current movies on a similar theme. It's not a preachy film, by any means, I've seen many worse - and recently (and since!)! A certain something in the movie had me feeling goose-bumpy. Towards the end, Demi's character asks if there is any way the world can be saved; the answer: "HOPE".




The movie caused me to do a little research to satisfy curiosity about "The Guf", something mentioned in the movie. The seventh sign of the coming "End" was said to be when The Guf is empty of souls and a baby is born dead. Turns out that this wasn't a concept invented for the movie as I had suspected. Here's what Wikipedia has to say:

In Jewish mysticism, the Chamber of Guf (or Guph or even Gup) (Hebrew for "body" or "corpse") also called the Otzar (Hebrew for "treasury") is the Hall of Souls, located in the Seventh Heaven. Every human soul is held to emanate from the Guf. The Talmud teaches that the Messiah will not come until the Guf is emptied of all its souls (Yevamot 62a).

The mystic significance of the Guf is that each person is important and has a unique role which only he, with his unique soul, can fulfill. Even a newborn baby brings the Messiah closer simply by being born.

In keeping with other Jewish legends that envision souls as bird-like, the Guf is sometimes described as a columbarium, or birdhouse. Folklore says sparrows can see the soul's descent and this explains their joyous chirping.

The peculiar idiom of describing the treasury of souls as a "body" may be connected to the mythic tradition of Adam Kadmon, the primordial man. Adam Kadmon, God's "original intention" for humanity, was a supernal being, androgynous and macro-cosmic (co-equal in size with the universe). When this Adam sinned, humanity was demoted to the flesh and blood, bifurcated and mortal creatures we are now. According to Kabbalah, every human soul is just a fragment (or fragments) cycling out of the great "world-soul" of Adam Kadmon. Hence, every human soul comes from the "guf" [of Adam Kadmon].

I like the legend. It fits well with a Jupiter/Neptune conjunction too.

By the way, the world does, narrowly, avoid apocalypse at the end of this movie - and all because of HOPE!

At imdb.com FAQs on the movie there's this:

The Bible does not include a definitive list of seven signs. Popular culture and various Christian sects created this concept based on their interpretations of events prophesied to take place before Armageddon, or the final battle of good and evil on Earth. The book of Revelation, which details the Apocalypse, speaks only of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in Rev. 6.12 and the seven seals, seven vials, and seven trumpets that will signal the destruction of the earth. The seven seals are ennumerated towards the end of the movie when Abby (Demi Moore) and Avi (Manny Jacobs) figure out what's going on. The seven seals are the four Horsemen, the death of the last martyr (seal 5), earthquakes and a blood moon (6th seal), and the birth of a baby without a soul (7th seal).

More at Wikipedia's page on the Book of Revelation's mention of seven seals.

Regarding the practicality of the mundane seven seals, Alyce McPherson in The Book of Seven Seals explains that in Roman times

The seal of each family was a mark of ownership and served as legal protection and guarantee in many ways, especially in relation to property. The seal belonged to the owner alone, and no one else had the right to it. If a will was written and sealed, it could be opened only in the event of the testator's death. In order to insure the will was opened legally, the testator many times removed the seal himself at the point of death.

According to Roman law, each legal document was sealed by the owner himself, and six witnesses had to affix their personal seal also. In order to be a legitimate witness, a person had to have a close relationship with the testator, and have first hand knowledge of their will and purpose in the disposition of his estate.

When the testator died, the will was opened and each of the six witnesses broke his own individual seal. Therefore, in order to be recognized as a legal document, the article had to have seven seals.

I prefer to see most Bible stories as symbolic, so found the following an interesting idea; it's on a message board HERE. : The seven seals can be seen as symbolic, and related to the seven Chakras. The message details each seal individually then summarises thus:

So now we have the ingredients. We have humans (spirits) falling to Earth (connecting to Earth as in the 1st Seal and Chakra) and are left without the arrow to point our way. This results in the breaking of the Second Seal and Chakra to manifest. With the arrow missing (most now call this the Veil) we desire to conquer and war in attempts to find the 'arrow'. The Third Seal is broken and the Third Chakra manifests. The result of war is death and famine. And in order to survive we must procreate and hope through sex and love. The Third Seal and Chakra is the duality of the first two seals and chakras. The Fourth Seal and Chakra allow us to begin thinking about what is after death, resulting in the belief that their is life beyond the Veil. Which breaks the Fifth Seal manifesting our longing for 'spirit'. We begin realizing that in order to do that, we need to break the Sixth Seal and allow the Sixth Chakra to open our Third Eye. And this glimpsing, through the Third Eye, of HOME, makes us long to break the Seventh Seal to FULLY and permanately open ourselves to the Divine, to reach HOME while remaining physical. One of the blocks, the reasons, why the Seventh Seal hasn't opened, is that we think HOME is outside ourselves, like we need to bring Heaven down to Earth. The Seventh Seal will open when WE ALL realize that HOME we need not search outside ourselves for it, for it is inside of us.
THE CIRCLE IS COMPLETE.

A comment further down the page points out that the seven seals "Can also be compared to the seven classical planets." Any thoughts?

Gimme Hope! ~ Forgotten Song Remembered

Music and songs have the almost unworldly power to arouse old memories.  
Sometimes it happens the other way around - the "man bites dog" effect. For some inexplicable reason a memory from the early 1990s surfaced from the depths the other day, and set me on a search for the related song.

We (late partner and I), sometime in the early 1990s, on an annual jaunt to Tenerife in the Canary Islands, were walking along the sea front area one evening on our way somewhere. We spied a colourfully dressed African guy singing and playing guitar in an open-fronted bar. The music was infectious. We sat down, ate, drank and listened for hours. The evening ended with the singer encouraging (actually forcing) us all onto our feet to form a chain and dance around the bar to a song I'd never heard before. That song was the one bugging my memory. I had to be a bit creative on the Google, I couldn't remember any detail, only the feeling, but after many attempts I eventually found the song on YouTube, with lyrics.



Eddy Grant, it turns out, was the composer and original vocalist. He was born 5 March 1948, in Guyana but as a child he emigrated to London, England with his parents. He had hits in the 1980s with I Don't Wanna Dance in the UK, and with Electric Avenue in the UK and USA. Many of his songs were politically slanted, especially against the apartheid regime then existing in South Africa.
The song bugging my memory: Gimme Hope Jo'anna was one of these ("Jo'anna" = Johannesburg, South Africa). It was a song about apartheid, and banned in South Africa. The line: "The Archbishop who's a peaceful man" is a reference to Desmond Tutu, first black South African Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town who received the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize for his fight against apartheid.

All of that was unknown to me as we danced and enjoyed the infectious rhythm. Why this song should surface from the depths of memory just now I don't know - except that the message, minus names and places, remains relevant:
"Gimme hope!"

More wise words on HOPE:

"HOPE has a cost. Hope is not comfortable or easy. Hope requires personal risk. It is not about the right attitude. Hope is not about peace of mind. Hope is action. Hope is doing something. The more futile, the more useless, the more irrelevant and incomprehensible an act of rebellion is, the vaster and more potent hope becomes.
Hope never makes sense. Hope is weak, unorganized and absurd. Hope, which is always nonviolent, exposes in its powerlessness, the lies, fraud and coercion employed by the state. Hope knows that an injustice visited on our neighbor is an injustice visited on all of us. Hope posits that people are drawn to the good by the good. This is the secret of hope's power. Hope demands for others what we demand for ourselves. Hope does not separate us from them. Hope sees in our enemy our own face." ~~~ Chris Hedges.

"Hope is a straw hat hanging beside a window covered with frost."
― Margaret George, "Mary Queen of Scotland & The Isles".