The McGolem & the Priestess in Breaking Brad (Loki S2 Ep 2, pt. 2) | Marvelous DeMystifiers ep. 26
The DeMystifiers continue the analysis of Loki Season 2, episode 2, Breaking Brad, to discuss the hidden symbolism of the Golem, the rise of automatic society and robot humans, the Ark and the destruction & regeneration of the universe, McDonald's (of all things!), and how the Lovers and Priestess card play so heavily into the metaphor in this episode. As usual, this thing is deep beyond your wildest imaginings, so don't miss out! Sure to be an enjoyable learning experience regardless of if you've followed the Loki TV show or our previous talks about it.
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In this episode
Core themes
Priestess, Lovers and the Numbers 73 and 67
Chance explained that he chose the Priestess and Lovers cards as his lens for the episode, and tracked the Hebrew letter gimel and the number 73 for the Priestess and zayin and 67 for the Lovers, along with 37 as its reverse. He reported finding those numbers in scene after scene, including the name Sigmund Freud, which he said added up to 67 in septenary gematria. Gabe noted that Chance read the show through the septenary cipher while he leaned on ordinal. Chance said he still did not know whether writers, AI, demons or God were behind the patterns.
Automats, the Golem and Automated McDonald's
One of the hosts traced the automat to the word automata and tied it to the idea of a predetermined universe, then linked it to McDonald's moving toward fully automated restaurants. The same host described the Hebrew word golem as a lump of clay given life with letters, and read it as a symbol of the legal straw man and of humans made machine-like by programming. Later the hosts discussed the Ark, the Greek number 37 and Sylvie sheltering at a 1982 McDonald's, offered as their own symbolic readings.
Mobius, Morpheus and the Movie Mobile
One of the hosts argued that the name Mobius echoed Morpheus, the Greek god of sleep, through the P and B letter swap, and suggested Mobius preferred to stay asleep rather than learn who he had been. That host also played with the B to V swap that turned Mobius into movies, and compared the Mobius strip to a film strip and to a mobile hung over a crib. The hosts agreed that entertainment could be entrainment, while enjoying rewatching a show for its layers.
The Brocken Specter and Chasing Your Shadow
Chance described the Brocken specter, the halo of light and shadow seen from Mount Brocken, as the visual of the loom scene, and read Coleridge's poem and Jung's dream about a shadow following him in the wind. He said the shadow was the unconscious part of a person beyond their control, and that every main character was chasing a true self outside the illusion of the TVA. He called the effect akin to television and said Gabe would add more, which led into a talk about the torch and the glory.
Gabe's Cicadas, Eggs and Geometry
Gabe tied the episode to the cicada broods due that spring, saying the Emperor card matched the scratchy stick instrument of capoeira and that he now saw the cicadas in the show's orange, brown and black colors. He described the helter-skelter staircase as an egg rack and said eggs were being seeded into minds. Later he showed that his phone easel had the same shape as Sylvie's altar, and argued geometry was the highest order of communication, then tied the Hermit card and a paper boat to the plot.
Quotes
“I mean the numerical linguistic riddles I find in this show are outstanding. They might even give you a clue on how to conduct research for yourself on certain things. I feel like this process has taught me a lot about how the code of numbers and letters that underlies all reality operates and how it all fits together.”
“What's interesting is that the pattern or the framework that you look at something through, that pattern begins to reveal itself. If it's a pattern that exists in nature, then it's gonna show up.”
“Brad got under Mobius's skin. That's the exact dialogue. He got under his skin and that's basically a Zayin reference because that letter in Hebrew can mean to pierce, and obviously if it appears, something you're getting under the skin.”
“Your shadow is chasing you as much as you're chasing your shadow. And the shadow is the part of yourself, the unconscious part of yourself, that is beyond your control.”
“You're chasing yourself. And what this loom is is all these threads of time being woven together and that's deeply symbolic. Like probably the last thing people want to think about or accept is that the deepest aspect of what you are, the capital S Self, is time. It's not like in time, it is time.”
“The main characters are literally all engaged in the chase for their true self. Loki, B-15, Sylvie, Mobius, Ouroboros, Renslayer, Brad Wolfe, all of them chasing shadows, trying to find out who they are outside of the illusion created by the TVA, the projection, the specter.”
“There's so much possible. It's profound. Get your story straight. Get your limiting stories deleted and self-author a much more powerful creative capacity for your life.”
“Part of the reason I got into the cicadas was when I found that the Emperor card is the scratchy stick musical instrument in the capoeira symposium. I've recently discovered that all the tarot cards are a musical bateria for the capoeira ritual, which gives me a very unique insight into these cards, which is very exciting.”
“Helter-skelter is actually a reference to an old kitchen mechanism a lot of people still know, and that is a rack that you store your eggs in so that you can use the oldest egg first and keep supplying the fresh eggs to the top of the rack.”
“It is also signifying eggs. They are inseminating our thoughts with eggs, and that is another pattern that I'm picking up on the Slick Dissident channel that is going to be a big deal. Considering how do these cicadas get hatched? How do these ideas get embedded into your mind?”
“Slick Dissident has had an altar where I put the phone on every episode. My altar is the same shape as Sylvie's altar. This is my little easel. This is where I put the phone when I do my videos.”
“What I think it could actually be channeled through is the geometry of the tools that we use. And that's why this Ara Altar keeps popping up everywhere I look, is because I can hear the muses. I know the muses very intimately. And so when I see some of their geometric truth, I realize that this is a fingerprint.”
“So that brings the Hermit card to mind more than before, because on the Hermit card it looks like a paper boat folded up. It's the Argo constellation. So this really fulfills the Hermit in a major way.”
Gabriel, known on air as Slick Dissident, co-hosts InnerVerse's Vibe Rant show and is a longtime recurring guest on the podcast. He teaches occult symbolism and tarot on his YouTube channel, ranging across the Major Arcana, the esoteric Enneagram, mythology and archetype, mystic linguistics, and the symbolism hidden in popular film. He is best known for Tarot-tories, his own system mapping the 22 Major Arcana and zodiac archetypes onto the geography of the United States.
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