Just noticed another little occult reference: the final episode of season 3 took place on the 93rd day on the island. The number 93 is significant to the occult religion Thelema, founded by Aleister Crowley. The primary values of Thelema are “love” and “will.” Using the numerology technique Isosephy, the numeric values of love and will combined are 93. The number is used as a common greeting by Thelemites, amongst other things.

(Above: the Room 23 scene in reverse)

In “Confirmed Dead” we learn that John would have died when Ben shot him in the back if he’d still had his kidney. This sounds a lot like “retroactive magic.” Retroactive magic is either the most cutting edge arena of modern magical practice or the most self-delusional (or both). According to Edward Wilson: “Retroactivity is the idea that actions taken in the present or the future can affect the past and therefore the affect can proceed the cause… It creates of causation an Ouroborus or Mobius strip.” In other words an occulist can alter the past as well as the future.

There’s some interesting possible uses of these concepts earlier in the series as well. Reversing the audio played while Karl is in Room 23, you can hear the mantra “only fools are enslaved by time and space.” Author and occultist Taylor Ellwood, author of Space/Time Magic once wrote an article on the use of “mind machines” for retroactive magic:

Mind Machines are technologies that can be used to induce altered states of mind. The mind machine uses audio strobe technologies to do this. The goggles have strobe lights in them, which a person looks into with his/her eyes closed. The audio part is the music or sounds, which are translated into light pulses, which are then beamed into your closed eyes. The different frequencies of sound shape the light frequencies, although you can also adjust the light intensity of the strobe lights, dimming them or brightening them as needed. This is especially useful if you want to overload your senses and put yourself into an excitatory state.

Is it possible that the Others were not just trying to brainwash Karl, but also to cause some sort of retroactive change? This idea is supported by Desmond’s experience in “Ms. Hawking. However, another possibility is that his past is being engineered by himself or by the Others or Dharma. It could be that in his original life, he DID buy the ring and ask Penny to marry him but he or someone else decided it would be better to end up at the island pushing the button.

More info:

Edward Wilson’s article

Taylor Ellwood’s Space/Time Magic and his article “Retroactive Magic and Mind Machines”

Foolish People is a theater troupe that does retroactive magic rituals as part of their performances.

Retroactive magic is a popular topic at Esozone, and Edward Wilson, Taylor Ellwood, and the Foolish People were all present in 2007.

Wikipedia: Mind Machines.

Brainwave Generator: mind machine software for Windows.

ABC using brainwashing and backwards masking in Lost.

Movies:

Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Bogus Journey.

Donnie Darko.

There wasn’t a whole lot of new occult stuff to chew on in the season premiere. But the last “Missing Pieces” clip reminds of me of an interesting occult reference Trevor Blake pointed out:

In 1875 Madame Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society, a proto-New Age occult organization that would have been quite an influence on The DHARMA Initiative. The “New Age” movement that the DHARMA Initiative invokes has its origins in Theosophy.

According to the White Dog Cafe web site:

While living on Sansom Street, Madame Blavatsky became ill with an infected leg. During her illness, she underwent a transformation which inspired her to found the Theosophical Society. In a letter dated June 12, 1875, Madame Blavatsky described her recovery, explaining that she dismissed the doctors and surgeons who threatened amputation, (”Fancy my leg going to the spirit land before me!”) and had a white dog sleep across her leg by night, curing all in no time.

Vincent is a yellow lab of a very light, mostly white color. The role of yellow labs and their possibly mystic role is expanding upon in the Lost Experience, particularly through the character Dr. Vincent Wally Bole. From Lostpedia:

“His life was a hellish nightmare of neglectful parents, and a near fatal accident until a kindly yellow lab pranced into his life and change him… forever.”

The nickname Wally comes from the family’s trusted Labrador Retriever who saved his life when, as a child, he fell into an abandoned well on the family estate. After this incident and because he had less-than attentive parents (his father was a near-famous neurosurgeon, his mother a saucier and the co-host of a little-watched TV show) he came to look to the dog as his surrogate parent.

The bond that developed between them and a chance encounter with The Hanso Foundation CEO and founder, Alvar Hanso, at a life-extension workshop in Rangoon would inspire Dr. Bolé to expand his research and eventually create the Retrievers Of Truth Institute for the Advancement and Research into the Mental Abilities of Yellow Labrador Retrievers.

It’s also noteworthy that Bole’s yellow lab research is in some ways reminiscent of the real life mad scientist John C. Lilly’s dolphin communication experiments. Lilly’s other work, particularly Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer has had a lasting impact on occultists, including Robert Anton Wilson, who Damon Lindelof has acknowledged as an influence.

Also, in Further Instructions Charlie makes a reference to the movie Altered States (”I’m going to stand out here in case you devolve into a monkey”), a movie inspired by Lilly’s work.

There’s a lot going on beneath the surface of the ABC television series Lost. Lost is sprinkled with references and allusions to the occult and esoteric secrets. Perhaps the most explicit reference is the use of the number 23. Since the release of the Jim Carrey movie,the significance of that number has become widely known.

But Lindelof and company started sprinkling the number throughout the first season, over 2 years before the movie. The number comes from Robert Anton Wilson, as Lindelof has confirmed at various times, including in this Entertainment Weekly interview:

My father was into the Illuminati and the number 23, so he was a big reader of Robert Anton Wilson. So there was some intentionality behind it, but we had no idea, no grand design behind the Numbers. But suddenly, the No. 1 question stopped being ”What is the Monster?” and went to being ”What do the Numbers mean?” This isn’t to say that the Numbers don’t mean anything. We just had no idea it had this potential to get totally out of control.

And also on this Maybe Logic Academy page, quoting from the Chicago Tribune:

But for Damon Lindelof, co-creator and executive producer of the ABC drama Lost, “It is a good lucky number. The first thing I do when I get to Las Vegas, every time I go, is I drop $50 on the number 23. It hasn’t hit yet, but one of these days…”

Lindelof has been fascinated by the 23 enigma since his childhood and has made the number part of the mysteries on Lost.Jack Shepard’s seat on doomed Oceanic Flight 815 was in Row 23. Twenty-three passengers from the tail section of the plane survived the crash. And the number is among Hurley’s winning lottery numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42 that end up bringing him and the other survivors bad luck.

Though Lindelof said the number 23 is often purposely used on Lost, he sometimes is just as surprised as some fans when it pops up. Conspiracy or coincidence? It’s a perfect illustration of the 23 enigma.

Who was Robert Anton Wilson? And why is the number 23 significant?

Robert Anton Wilson was an author who researched and wrote about, amongst many other things, the occult and secret societies. He is perhaps most famous for his Illuminatus novels and his non-fiction Cosmic Trigger series. I think any fan of Lost would especially enjoy reading the first Cosmic Trigger book, Wilson’s autobiographical detailing his “stranger than fiction” life.

One of Wilson’s fascinations was the number 23. He discovered it by way of two other writers: James Joyce and William S. Burroughs. Wilson claimed Joyce was fascinated by the date April 23: the day Shakespeare was born, and the day he died. Burroughs became obsessed with the number after the following bizarre incident:

In the early ’60’s in Tangiers, William Burroughs knew a certain “Captain Clark” who ran a ferry from Tangiers to Spain. One day, Clark said to Burroughs that he’d been running the ferry 23 years without an accident. That very day the ferry sank, killing Clark and everyone aboard. In the evening, Burroughs was thinking about this when he turned on the radio. The first newscast headlined the crash of an airline plane on the New York-Miami route. The pilot was another Captain Clark and the flight was listed as Flight 23.

Wilson, and later his readers, began compiling more and more 23 synchronicities. Here are a few from Fusion Anomoly:

W is the 23 letter of this alphabet. The symbol for that letter is two points down and three points up.

The human biorhythm cycle is generally 23 days. One measures a circle beginning anywhere.

It takes 23 seconds for blood to circulate through the human body.

The human body has 46 chromosomes, which are paired, in somatic cells. Generative cells have half this number, 23, which is the number of chromosomes each parents gives to human

23 Axioms in Euclid’s Geometry.

The Knights Templars had only 23 Grandmasters. Jacques de Molay was the 23rd and last of the Templar Grandmasters.

23 is the first prime number in which both digits are prime numbers and add up to another prime number.

There are many, many others. Here’s another lengthy list. And here’s a list to uses of 23 in the show.

And 23 is just scratching the surface. We’ll be looking at Lost’s references to the occult, secret societies, conspiracies, utopian engineering, mad science, underground culture, numerology, geomancy, alchemy and more. Keep watching this site, or subscribe by RSS, for more occult secrets!