Through a round-about sort of way, I’ve happened across some interesting points of intersection between the TV show LOST and the writings of Aleister Crowley. Among Crowley’s writings are The Book of the Law (a book with a similar title featured in an episode of LOST) and an account of “The Lost Continent of Atlantis” that features, among other things, Atlanteans who cannot have children, and a fear that further “progress” beyond the perfection they’d achieved would mean a loss of perfection and be detrimental, and thus a plan emerged to preserve the status quo.
I’m sure I’m not the only one who saw a resemblance between Daniel Faraday’s diagram of space-time (also found in the Hydra station in “The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham”) and depictions of Gnostic emanations, Hermetic, mystical and magical diagrams, and that sort of thing.But perhaps most intriguing is the apparent similarity between John Locke and Crowley himself. Crowley apparently believed he was special from birth, destined for greatness. And so one wonders what the message of LOST will be. Is it that belief in one’s own specialness becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, one that inspires all sorts of people to do horrific things?
Another echo I missed until it was pointed out to me is of The Last Temptation of Christ. In the scene where Locke is about to kill himself and then Ben arrives, it is very reminiscent of the scene when an “angel” appears and tells Jesus he can come down from the cross, he’s suffered enough. But in that movie, Judas is friend rather than traitor, and interestingly enough, given the Ben/Judas parallels, in both the necessary death comes about through Ben’s/Judas’ influence, but in very different ways. And so as always, there are not only echoes and parallels but inversions of other stories and their themes and characters as well.
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