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Originally posted by Malkhos
1. It seems that the robotic represents in anime what in traditional western literature is signified by the daemonic, something that is niether entirely human or divine. Roger, Dorothy and Big O seem to form a sort of trinity along the lines of Body, Soul and Intellect, representing three phases of existence (physical, spritual, and divine) of a single being. I think once they gain an enlightened self-understanding of how they are related, the story line will reach a resolution similar to that of Patrick MacGoohan's The Prisoner: they will gain access to their memories, all difficulties and concerns that they had will be dispelled as illusions, and they will fulfill whatever their ultimate role is to be.
2. 'negotiator' could well signify mediator, a figure that intercedes between the human and divine worlds, in other words a savior or Jesus.
3. 'Paradigm' could well signify the Platonic Forms, the true ideas that exist behind our accidental and illusorary perceptions that we mistake for relaity. The world of the forms is, of course, equated in Jewish and Christian belief with heaven.Perhaps the unjust tyrannical Paradigm City that we know so far is destinied to be stripped away and its true, just and heavenly nature revealed by Roger/Dorothy/Big O?
4. In Platonism as well as in the Gnostic and Jewish versions of Platonainism, the world as we experience it is made by the demiurge (craftsman), as a necessarily inferior phyiscal copy of the true world of the Forms. In many cases this creator is equated with Satan, and the world is viewed as as a prison designed to keep man from a redemptive return to Heaven. It seems easy to discern these concepts in Paradigm City and the Rosewater family.
5. Dagon, Leviathan, and Behemoth, were Caananite gods defeated and triuphed over by the Judeo-Christian God. I was just reading in another thread that a new characters is about to be intruduced called
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| Venus--Venus is the traditional Latin equivalent of Astarte, another Caananite god. Perhaps the ultimate conculsion will utilize themes of a quarelling, dangerous 'pagan' pantheon being replaced by a single redeeming God? |
6. Megadeus (the pl. form would be Megadei) is a Greek-Latin Hybrid which signifies 'GreatGod.' Why on earth did the English dubbing render this as the meaningless 'megadeuce?' The names Big O, Big Duo, Big Fowl, etc., seem somewhat ridiculous. Are they in fact poor translations, as I suspect, of Buhhdist metaphysical terms? In the brilliant scene near the begining of the second season in which Roger views a play representing his memory of his first encounter with Big O, it seemed as if they wre going to any second reveal that the name meant 'Great Nothingness' or something like that. Dominus, in case anyone does not know, is Latin for 'master.'
7. In Platonic metaphyiscs, memories are not memories of the perceived world of illusion we inhabit, but memories of our true prior existence in heaven. These memories are washed away prior to our incarnation in our body by drinking the waters of the river Lethe (forgetufullness). We spend our lives trying to recover these lost memories through the senses; but the wise man realizes that this is doomed since the original cannot be recalled through a cheap copy, and instead looks within, gathering what snathces of mystic insight he can. |
In addition, the following amterial is quoted form the
Orpheus thread:
The spiritual part of Greek religion was the mysteries of Orpheus (or Orphism), which became, through Pythagoras, the foudnation of Greek philosophy.
According to this teaching, the first gods were the Titans or Giants, who were terrible, destructive mosnters. Their king Chronos (time) ate all of his childern, except Zeus, whom his mother hid away. When he grew to full godhood he came and defeated the Titans with his thunderbolts and chained them in a cavern in Tartaros, deep under the earth. Mankind was built out of the ashes of the Titans' physical bodies left over from the battle, this is why we have a fallen sinful nature and why we must rely on our imperfect phyiscal senses for knoweldge, instead of intuitively seeing the ture nature of things the way a god does. Orphism is the origin of the idea of divine judgement, that the souls of the dead will be rewarded or punished depending on whether they were sinners or not (guilty, or not guilty, as it were). Orphism was also the the origin of the idea that human sould (the divine, not Titanic, part of man) were pre-existent in heaven and, when they came into their bodies, drank form the river Lethe, the waters of forgetfullness, taking away their memories of the divine world.
An orphic sage could become a god by undergoing a ritual of katabasis (descent). In this he would descend into the underworld, beginning in some cave or chasm, going deeper underground until he reached the palace of the underworld gods, where he would meet and understand his true nature. When he emerged again from the earth he would be a god by virtue of knowing the true divine nature inherent in every human being.
I hardly need to elaborate how all of this was played out in episode 25, excpet to add that when Roger identified himself after his katabasis he said, 'I am who I am,' which is the answer God gave to Moses on mount Sinai when asked about his name.
I would not ordinarly think that something so obscure as Orphism would underlay a popualr television show like Big O, but the presentation of the material in this episode was all too clear and specific. It is not that surprising however, educated Japanese often learn far more about western spritiuality than westerners themselves do. I can hardly doubt that the creators of Big O were famialr with Orphsim and purpsoely set out to create an allegorical retelling of it--presenting this kind of religio-philosophical material in an allegorical fiction was a standard practice in antiquity, so that its secrets would not be too readily presented to the profane. Also, The explicit mention of Oedipus--while not specifically Orphic, in some sense authorizes or suggests to us to look to Greek material to explain the show's symbolism.
"Ten is the very nature of number. All Greeks and all barbarians alike count up to ten, and having reached ten revert again to the unity. And again, Pythagoras maintains, the power of the number 10 lies in the number 4, the tetrad. This is the reason: if one starts at the unit (1) and adds the successive number up to 4, one will make up the number 10 (1+2+3+4 = 10). And if one exceeds the tetrad, one will exceed 10 too.... So that the number by the unit resides in the number 10, but potentially in the number 4. And so the Pythagoreans used to invoke the Tetrad as their most binding oath: `By him that gave to our generation the Tetractys, which contains the fount and root of eternal nature...'"
(Aetius I. 3)
The significance of some of this material has become clearer with the last episode.
1. Big O, Dorothy, and Roger were revealed to be functioning as a single entitiy. In this case thier ultimately role is repeat their existence in a new reality (see no. 4 below).
2. Roger said that he had given up his memories voluntarily. Preseumably this applies to everyone in paradigm City. Moreover they had done so because only by forgoing memory oculd they experience temporal existence in Paradigm city. This corresponds still moree closely to the Orphic/Platonic scheme. Souls drink from the revier Lethe (forgetfulness) and descned to earth becuase they are seduced by the intoxication of the water. Without their memories of the heavenly world the sould are able to accept the sense impressions experienced in the world as reality--the philospher looses that ability to the degree he remebers the true existence in heavena nd so the world seems less and less real to him.
3. Angel is the demiurge (the devil in the Gnostic version of Platonism) who creates and rules the physical world. This does not contradict my earlier characterization of her as the imagination, since the iamgination was, for the Platonsits, the demiurgic pwoer within man, which constatnly created the world by comapring sense perception to the (unconscious) memory of the world of the Forms.
4. The last episode leaves little doubt that a Stoic cyclical world order is to be envisioned. Stricly speaking in Soticism, the world repeats itself exactly the same every time it is recreated. That does not seem to be the case here. This, then, is the Kabbalisitc version, in which the world is created and destroyed repeatedly until it is finally perfected in the messianic age.
5. As created beings, humans are esentially little differnt from Robots--at least in respect of their bodies.
6. According to the kabbalah, in this age the Torah (Bible) is black ink written on white parchement, but in the Messianic age it will be white fire written on black fire (a neagtive image). That must be the explanation for the transformtion of the
Metropolis book to black, and the subsequent use of negative images.